Bio-nanoparticle: A green synthesis approach of nanotechnology

Nanotechnology an emerging field of science, that synthesizes, develops, and utilizes nanomaterials their elements occur at the nanoscale ranging in size from 1- 100 nm. In this century, metal nanoparticles have drawn much interest due to their diverse physical, chemical, and biological properties and thus many researchers have focused on the synthesis of nanoparticles. The application of nanoparticles is in various fields such as biomedical, tissue engineering, health care, environmental, drug delivery, gene delivery, food industry, space industry. The various chemical and physical methods are carried out to synthesize nanoparticles, but unfortunately, such methods are harmful, quite expensive, and uses toxic chemicals that are responsible for various biological risks and potentially hazardous to the environment.

In recent years, biological synthesize has been widely studied as an alternative, efficient, cost-effective, eco-friendly, and simple method for producing nanoparticles. Biological ways of nanoparticle synthesis using bacteria, actinomycetes, enzymes, algae, fungus, and plants or plant extracts. Metallic nanoparticles such as silver, gold, platinum, zirconium, palladium, iron, cadmium, and metal oxides such as titanium oxide, zinc oxide, etc. can be synthesized using micro-organisms and plants.

In general, the size of a nanoparticle ranges between 1 and 100 nm and they have different physical and chemical properties from bulk metals such as different melting points, higher specific surface areas, optical properties, mechanical strengths, etc. And depend not only on their composition but also on size and shape, so materials at their nano-scale behave differently.

Nanoparticles can be used for Fluorescent biological labels, Drug and gene delivery, Detection of proteins, Probing of DNA structure, Tissue engineering, Tumour destruction, Separation and purification of biological molecules, MRI contrast enhancement, detection of pathogens. In Protein detection, to identify protein-protein interaction gold nanoparticles are widely used in immunohistochemistry.

Nanotechnology is often applied in agriculture to improve the yield of crops, as antiviral agents by blocking viral attachment to the cell surface, fungicidal, and fungistatic by disruption of the cell membrane. Nanoparticles are used to break down oil into biodegradable compounds. Nanoparticles synthesized by biological methods were found to be more pharmacologically active than physiochemically synthesized nanoparticles. Nanotechnologies have increases possibilities of converting the less soluble, poorly absorbed, and unstable biologically active substance into favorable deliverable substances. Furthermore, milestones can be achieved for the biologically synthesized nanoparticles by controlling critical parameters, various biological sources, incubation period, pH, and temperature.

Keywords: Nanoparticles, green synthesis, biological synthesis, nanotechnology

References:

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