15 - Polysaccharide-based metal nanoparticles

Abstract

Nowadays various types of metallic nanostructures either homogenous or heterogeneous acquired promisingly consideration to be applicable in technological advancements due to their interchangeable physicochemical and biological properties with enhanced performance compared to their original counterparts. Heterogeneous metallic nanostructures are composed by combining two or more different nanometals, while heterogeneous metallic (bimetallic and trimetallic) nanostructures have extensively attracted researchers attention compared to homogeneous (monometallic) nanostructures in both scientific and technological view owing to that heterogeneous type always shows much better activities. Therefore, numerous researching reports were interestingly considered with innovation of various techniques for synthesis of homogeneous and heterogeneous metallic nanostructures, however, chemical reduction method is widely exploited as quite simple technique for synthesis in which a reducing and stabilizing agents are required for nucleation of size/shape controlled and highly stable nanostructures. Various types of polymers were functionalized as powerful stabilizer for nanostructures. Polysaccharides as a special class of natural polymers are widely exploited in synthesis of either homogeneous or heterogeneous nanostructures. Owing to the environmentally safety, biodegradability, biocompatibility, renewability, intercomposition of multifunctional polymeric chains, and ease processing, different types of polysaccharides could superiorly act as stabilizing agent or the dual role of reducing agent and stabilizer. The current chapter represents a wide survey for numerous researching studies which focused on the exfoliation of polysaccharides in nanostructures preparation. The current chapter also focused on the problems of the spatial arrangement of nanostructures and elucidation of the polymer role as nanotemplate and presented the synergistic role of the ingredients on the performance of the as-synthesized nanostructures.