Bionanoparticles: synthesis and antimicrobial applications

It has been know that silver and its compounds have strong inhibitory and microbicidal activities for bacteria, fungi, and virus. Compared with other metals, silver exhibits higher toxicity to microorganism while it exhibits lower toxicity to mammalian cells. More recent advancement in researches on metal nanoparticles, silver nanoparticles (SNPs) has lot of scope for health care products such as burn dressings, scaffolds, water purification systems, antimicrobial applications and medical devices. Few researches focus for agriculture application. Hence, many people tried to synthesis SNPs with a variety of synthesis methods including chemical reduction, electrochemical techniques, photochemical reactions, and now a day via green chemistry route. Use of plants and microbes in synthesis of SNPs is quite novel method as it coast effective and environmental friendly and easily scaled up for large scale synthesis. In this chapter we highlighted about the various plants, bacteria, fungi and actinmycetes used in this process, synthesizing methodology; nanoparticles size, shape, and their application as antimicrobials in in elaborate manner. We also highlighted the basic mechanism by which SNPs interact with microbes and future recommendations.