Plant-Mediated Synthesis of Iron Oxide Nanoparticles and Evaluation of the Antimicrobial Activity: A Review

In this review, we examine ‘greener’ routes to nanoparticles of iron oxides, in the recent years; nanotechnology has emerged as a state-of-the-art and cutting edge technology with multifarious applications in a wide array of fields. Natural products or extracted from natural products, such as different plant extracts, have been used as reductants and as capping agents during synthesis. A very easy, efficient, and environment-friendly protocol was developed to synthesize green nanoparticles (NPs) with an aqueous extract of various plant, phenolic compounds extracted from plants play a major role as non-toxic reducing and capping agents for nanoparticles. Nanoparticles and their compounds are known to exert a strong inhibitory and microbial activity on bacteria, viruses, and fungi. In today's world, because of the epidemic of infectious diseases caused by different pathogenic bacteria and the development of antibiotic resistance, green synthesis, characterization, and application of nanoparticles (NPs) are becoming an important challenge in nanotechnology. Green synthesis of nanoparticles is made in large quantities worldwide for a wide range of applications. This technique is very safe and environmentally friendly.