Abstract
Green approach has received major attention for the synthesis of metal oxide nanoparticles. One such metal oxide nanoparticles are iron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs). IONPs have fetched a great deal of interest in recent era because of their magnetic nature, as they can be easily recovered from the reaction mixture by applying an external magnetic field. Although, a variety of chemical and physical methods of synthesis are known, green synthesis is safer, sustainable and biologically acceptable. Plants and microbes are the main biological materials used for the green synthesis. In present review, the synthesis of IONPs by using plants, bacteria, fungi and algae have been highlighted. IONPs produced by plants, fungi, bacteria and algae usually falls in 1–100 nm range and are of distinct shapes like cubic, tetragonal crystalline, spherical, cylindrical, elliptical, octahedral, orthorhombic, hexagonal rods, nanosphere and quasi spherical. Furthermore, these biomaterials play role of reducing, capping, stabilizing and fabricating agents in green synthesis of nanoparticles. The review put forward a comprehensive report of various routes used for synthesizing IONP, biologically. Intuition into the procedures for synthesis of nanoparticles will help to nourish our learning in the area of nanotechnology.
Highlights
Nanotechnology is propitious and widely flourishing branch of science that has received major success in the era of modern technology
Extra step of annealing at 500°C for 2 h was done after drying of NPs (Khalil et al, 2017; Arularasu et al, 2018) but in Razack et al (2020) biosynthesis method dried iron oxide nanoparticles are further treated for calcination in muffle furnace at 400°C for 3 h
In the protocol followed by Chauhan and Upadhyay (2019) for the synthesis of iron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs) from Lawsonia inermis, nanoparticles obtained were capped with tyrosine by dispersing the NPs, in the tyrosine solution for 2 h at 4°C with continuous stirring followed by washing with deionized water and methanol before the final drying of the NPs
Summary
Nanotechnology is propitious and widely flourishing branch of science that has received major success in the era of modern technology. Biological biosynthesis of iron oxide nanoparticles is based upon the usage of living biota like plants, bacteria, algae, actinomycetes, viruses and fungi (Thakkar et al, 2010; Schröfelet al., 2014; Vijayaraghavan and Ashokkumar, 2017; Mirza et al, 2018; Latif et al, 2019; Gahlawat and Choudhury, 2019; Sharma et al, 2019; Vasantharaj et al, 2019) This organic synthesis depends on the usage of universal solvent i.e., water and generates nanoparticles that are free from venomous chemical impurities and made them widely accepted in biomedical field (Pantidos and Horsfall, 2014; Gholampoor et al, 2015). In this review we mainly emphasize on the biological synthesis of iron oxide nanoparticles by bacteria, fungi, algae and plants (Figure 3), along with their merits and demerits
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