Recent progress on green synthesis of selenium nanoparticles – a review

Nanoparticles (NPs) have attracted huge attention in various fields such as materials science, biology, and chemistry. Green NPs synthesis has been preferred over conventional physical and chemical approaches due to their reduced environmental toxicity using living organisms such as plants, bacteria, algae, and others as reducing and stabilizing agents. Green synthesized selenium nanoparticles (SeNPs) have great significance due to their biocompatibility and usage in applications such as electronics, sensors, catalysis, optics, antimicrobial agents, energy processing, etc. Herein, the SeNPs synthesis approaches, structural morphology, chemical composition with different reducing agents, including plants and microbes, and factors affecting the production of NPs are briefly discussed. Significant research has shown that green synthesis is constrained by the time and location of production, as well as problems with low purity due to the complexity of geographical and seasonal distributions of plants. However, considering current environmental problems and pollution associated with chemical synthesis, green synthesis offers alternative development prospects and potential applications. This review offers a detailed 10-year overview of key discoveries in the green approach to SeNPs and prospects for the future.