Chapter 5 - Green biosynthesized metallic nanoparticles and future biomedical applications

Abstract

Nanotechnology is a relatively new discipline that has applications in various spheres of life. The synthesis of these nanoparticles involves many toxic chemicals that have many health hazards and is also not environmentally friendly. The green biosynthesized nanoparticles are synthesized from many sources, such as bacteria, virus, algae, phage, and plants, including important medicinal plants, and are proving helpful and promising in this regard. In this chapter, many green synthesis routes and their synthesis involving their properties with applications are discussed. The current therapeutic approaches suffer from toxicity problems and microbial multidrug resistance issues. So exploiting the potential of plants having different phytometabolites is one of the green synthesis routes and is significant. As the metal nanoparticles have received great attention across the globe, in this chapter we have discussed and focused on many different metallic nanoparticles obtained by green synthesis. The metallic nanoparticles display many properties such as antibacterial, antifungal, anticancer, antiviral, etc. Various secondary metabolites, enzymes, and coenzymes present in the source, sometimes help in easy reduction of metal ions to nanoparticles. These nanoparticles are also used in controlling cell division, thereby acting as anticancerous agents. We present an upcoming, prospective aspects of the recent advances in green synthesis of metallic nanoparticles and biomedical applications with their future prospects in pharmaceutical industries.