Mycobacterium smegmatis is a non-pathogenic microorganism and has been widely used as a model organism to study infections caused by M. tuberculosis and other mycobacterial pathogens. We report that nanoparticles conjugated with selected carbohydrate show a striking increase in the surface adherence by M. smegmatis. This applies to silica nanoparticles and magnetic nanoparticles ranging from 100 nm to 5 nm. Under the same experimental conditions, minimum adhesion was observed for unfunctionalized nanoparticles. The synthesis and characterization of the glyconanoparticles will be presented. The finding is applied to imaging M. smegmatis infected lung epithelial cells, and the results will be discussed
