Li et al., 2001; Williams, 2008).

Research in nanotechnology provides reliable, eco-friendly

processes for the synthesis of nanoscale materials like bioprocesses and ‘‘green’’ chemistry.
Inspiration from nature comes through magnetotactic bacteria synthesizing magnetite nanoparticles,
diatoms synthesizing siliceous materials and S-layer bacteria producing gypsum and calcium
carbonate layers. Duran et al. showed that silver nanoparticles (AgNPs), like their bulk counterpart,
are an effective antimicrobial agent against various pathogenic microorganisms (Burleson et al.,
2004). Although various chemical and biochemical methods are being explored for production of
AgNPs, microbes are exceedingly effective in this process (Nanda & Saravanan, 2009). New
enzymatic approaches using bacteria and fungi in the synthesis of nanoparticles both intra- and extra-
cellularly have been expected to have a key role in many conventional and emerging technologies.
Synthesis of nanoparticles was found to be intracellular in many cases but makes the job of
downstream processing difficult (Figure 1).
The bioreduction of the Ag + ions could be associated with metabolic processes utilizing nitrate by
reducing nitrate to nitrile and ammonium (Lengke et al., 2007). Cyanobacteria commonly use nitrate
as the major source of nitrogen. Nitrate was reduced by cyanobacteria metabolic process.
NO—3 þ2Hþ þ2e— ¼ NO—2 þH2 O

NO—2 þ8Hþ þ6e— ¼ NHþ4 þ2H2 O

It suggests that Ag+ ions could be reduced by an intracellular electron donor (Figure 2; Lengke et al.,
2007).
Polysaccharide method
In this method, AgNPs are prepared using water as an environmentally benign solvent and
polysaccharides as a capping agent, or in some cases, polysaccharides serve as both a reducing and
a capping agent. For instance, synthesis of starch-AgNPs was carried out with starch as a capping
agent and b-D-glucose as a reducing agent in a gently heated system (Raveendran et al., 2003). The
starch in the solution mixture avoided using of relatively toxic organic solvents (Amanullah & Yu,
2005). In addition, the binding interactions between starch and AgNPs are weak and can be
reversible at higher
Figure 1. Precipitated silver nanoparticles on the cyanobacteria cell surface.

Figure 2. Cyanobacteria cells with nanoparticles of silver inside the cell (Lengke et al., 2007).

temperatures, allowing separation of the synthesized particles (Akbarzadeh et al., 2012a–d, 2013a,b;
Ghasemali et al., 2013; Mollazade et al., 2013; Nejati-Koshki et al., 2013; Rezaei- Sadabady et al.,
2013; Valizadeh et al., 2012 ).