Quorum sensing (QS) plays a vital role in regulating the virulence factor of many food borne pathogens, which causes severe public health risk. Therefore, interrupting the QS signaling pathway may be an attractive strategy to combat microbial infections. In the current study QS inhibitory activity of quercetin and its anti-biofilm property was assessed against food-borne pathogens using a bio-sensor strain. In addition in-silico techniques like molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulation studies were applied to screen the quercetin’s potentiality as QS inhibitor. Quercetin (80μg/ml) showed the significant reduction in QS-dependent phenotypes like violacein production, biofilm formation, exopolysaccharide (EPS) production, motility and alginate production in a concentration-dependent manner. Synergistic activity of conventional antibiotics with quercetin enhanced the susceptibility of all tested pathogens. Furthermore, Molecular docking analysis revealed that quercetin binds more rigidly with LasR receptor protein than the signaling compound with docking score of -9.17Kcal/mol. Molecular dynamics simulation predicted that QS inhibitory activity of quercetin occurs through the conformational changes between the receptor and quercetin complex. Above findings suggest that quercetin can act as a competitive inhibitor for signaling compound towards LasR receptor pathway and can serve as a novel QS-based antibacterial/anti-biofilm drug to manage food-borne pathogens.

In this study, the synthesis and characterization of exopolysaccharide-stabilized sliver nanoparticles (AgNPs) was carried out for the degradation of industrial textile dyes. Characterization of AgNPs was done using surface plasmon spectra using UV-Vis spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Raman spectroscopy. The morphological nature of AgNPs was determined through transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM), which indicated that the AgNPs were spherical in shape, with an average size of 35 nm. The thermal behaviour of AgNPs revealed that it is stable up to 437.1 °C and the required energy is 808.2J/g in TGA-DTA analysis. Ability of EPS stabilized AgNPs for degradation of azo dyes such as Methyl orange (MO) and Congo red (CR) showed that EPS stabilized AgNPs were found to be efficient in facilitating the degradation process of industrial textile dyes. The electron transfer takes place from reducing agent to dye molecule via nanoparticles, resulting in the destruction of the dye chromophore structure. This makes EPS-AgNPs a suitable, cheap and environment friendly candidate for biodegradation of harmful textile dyes.