A facile one-pot sonochemical synthesis of surface-coated mannosyl protein microspheres for detection and killing of bacteria.

We report a remarkably facile one-pot sonochemical approach to prepare protein microspheres whose shells are covalently decorated with a mannosyl derivative to target Escherichia coli (E. coli), while their cores are encapsulated with tetracycline. Conjugated microspheres induced the agglutination of E. coli and increased the anti-bacterial activity of the encapsulated tetracycline by five fold.