Metal nanoparticles (MNPs) produced by green approaches have received global attention because of their physicochemical characteristics and their applications in the field of biotechnology. In recent years, the development of synthesizing NPs by plant extracts has become a major focus of researchers because of these NPs have low hazardous effect in the environment and low toxicity for the human body. Synthesized NPs from plants are not only more stable in terms of size and shape, also the yield of this method is higher than the other methods. Moreover, some of these MNPs have shown antimicrobial activity which is consistently confirmed in past few years. Plant extracts have been used as reducing agent and stabilizer of NPs in which we can reduce the toxicity in the environment as well as the human body only by not using chemical agents. Furthermore, the presence of some specific materials in plant extracts could be extremely helpful and effective for the human body; for instance, polyphenol, which may have antioxidant effects has the capability for capturing free radicals before they can react with other biomolecules and cause serious damages. In this article, we focused on of the most common plants which are regularly used to synthesize MNPs along with various methods for synthesizing MNPs from plant extracts.
Keywords: Metal nanoparticles (MNPs); gold nanoparticles (GNPs); plant extracts; silver nanoparticles (SNPs); zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NPS).