Recent advances in applications, antimicrobial, cytotoxic activities and their associated mechanism of green silver nanoparticles: A review

Abstract

Apart from antibiotic resistance, the increasing incidence of cancers is among the serious health challenges facing humans today around the world. These indeed need new and environmentally friendly solutions. In this respect, synthesis and application of nanoparticles simply AgNPs have become of compelling interest within the last few years, especially within the area of biomedicine. The green synthesis of AgNPs using plant extracts is one of the promising eco-friendly methods that has treated microbial infections and acted against cancerous activities. A literature search on databases Web of Science, PubMed, and Scopus was performed between January 2023 and October 2023 in light of PRISMA. Afterward, screening for articles by title and abstract was implemented. Then, retrieved eligible studies were assessed for full-text inclusion criteria analysis. The reviewed findings show that AgNPs have contributed to health-related applications in the development of consumer goods like UV-resistant ointments and cosmetics. Their biomedical application is huge, especially regarding developing diagnosis devices for viruses such as Ebola, yellow fever, and Dengue. AgNPs thereby exhibited formidable antimicrobial action against a wide array of pathogenic microorganisms, each representing Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. It proved to be effective even against antibiotic-resistant strains and pathogenic fungi. Besides this, their anticancer potentialities are quite extraordinary. In short, all these studies have given evidence for outstanding antimicrobial and anticancer efficiencies of biologically synthesized AgNPs to combat some of the serious health issues of the modern era.