Exfoliation, functionalization and antibacterial activity of transition metal dichalcogenides

Due to the growing resistance of available drugs to bacterial infection and the slow development of antibiotics, there is a continuous need to design and develop new antibacterial agents. The interest to develop transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) based antibacterial agents has significantly increased in recent years. This research interest is driven by their interesting properties such as metallic and semiconducting nature of different phases, electronic confinement, large surface to volume ratio, the possibility of surface functionalization, and their potential application as a material in biomedical sciences. Different synthetic strategies have been developed to synthesize monolayered TMDs and their functionalization with different bioactive molecules. Researchers have given a lot of effort to establish the structure–activity correlation between different TMDs and their antibacterial activity. Here, we have reviewed various exfoliation strategies for TMDs, different methods for their functionalization, and the antibacterial activity of different TMDs.