Introduction: Silver nanoparticles (NPs) are widely used in biomedicine and tissue engineering. For this reason, it is very important to carefully study biological activity of such NPs. The aim of this paper was to study the influence of Ag NPs of the same size (10 nm) but in various stabilizers on cell viability and reproduction of viruses.

Methodology: Ag NPs were stabilized in tryptophan or SDS. The toxicity of NPs was evaluated using changes in cell viability and metabolic activity. The antiviral activity against HSV-1, HAdV-2 and IAV was assessed using virus yield reduction assay.

Results: It was found that the metabolic activity of cells depended on the type of stabilizer of silver nanoparticles. The Ag in tryptophan are non-toxic for studied cells (BHK-21, Hep-2, and MDCK), because in all used concentrations, cell viability was in the range of 90 - 100%. In contrast, using of Ag NPs in SDS (1070-107 ng/ml) led to a significant decrease of cell viability (99-60%). It was detected that Ag NPs in tryptophan in concentrations 1 - 1070 ng/ml significantly reduced the titer of the IAV (by 1.39-7.49 log). Whereas for HSV-1 and HAdV-2 such an effect was not observed. But Ag NPs in SDS showed better anti-adenovirus effect than in tryptophan, the decrease of virus titer was 1.15 - 1.28 log.

Conclusion: The results presented in this work demonstrated that the nature of the stabilizer of NPs is the one of the factor governing their toxicity and antiviral activity.