Plant-Mediated Synthesis of Silver Nanoparticles – A Critical Review

Abstract

Nanomedicine is a revolutionary science nanoparticles of size 1 - 100nm designed for the utilization in disease diagnostics and therapeutics, targeted drug delivery of drugs which have difficulty in solubility and bioavailability and also to be applied in numerous fields. The present critical review aims at enumerating the advantages, synthesis and characterization methods, as well as diversified applications of green silver nanoparticles. Silver nanoparticles is an attractive proposition due to their distinctive physical, chemical and biological properties including a high electrical as well as thermal conductivity, surface-enhanced Raman scattering, chemical stability, catalytic activity and non linear optical behavior which enables them of potential value in inks, microelectronics, and medical imaging. Plant mediated synthesis of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) is now-a-day’s gaining enormous interest as it is cost effective, ecofriendly and has less side effects since there is no addition of external stabilizing or capping agents as the plant itself acts as stabilizing or capping agent. The secondary metabolites and other plant products like proteins, metabolites like alkaloids, terpinoids, saponins, glycosides etc are known to act as external stabilizing or capping agents. The plant mediated silver nanoparticles are known to show uniform particles characteristics and morphology. The bottom to top end approach of synthesis is effective to achieve desired particles size, shape and morphology. The synthesized green silver nanoparticles are characterized by UVVis spectroscopy, SEM/TEM analysis, EDAX/EDS, FTIR and other methods zeta potential measurement, thermo gravimetric analysis, Raman scattering. The plant mediated synthesized silver nanoparticles (green silver nanoparticles) are effective in delivering pharmacological activities like antimicrobial, anticancer, larvicidal etc. Also green Silver nanoparticles have diverse applications acting as biosensors, as targeted drug delivery candidates, in diagnostics and therapeutics, in medical and consumer products, as anti pollutant and in agriculture. The future perspective holds promising results in green synthesis of silver nanoparticles involving plants. This review projects a collective sequence of information for synthesizing and evaluation of green silver nanoparticles and scope of its pharmacological actions.