Optical properties of biomass-derived nanomaterials for sensing, catalytic, biomedical and environmental applications

Biomass-derived nanomaterials are becoming increasingly attractive if not indispensable in both academic and industrial fields within the past decades, coupled with growing interest in green chemistry and renewable energy. The profitable utilization of biomass for the development of functional materials has yielded immense promising research output, which has enabled multiple applications in various realms. This review focuses on major eco-friendly and green synthetic approaches and applications of nanomaterials prepared from biomass sources. In particular, abundant active functional groups and intricate biostructures as well as sophisticated organic frameworks hailing from biomass, which endow the as-prepared nanomaterials with unique properties and functionalities have been elaborated upon. Encompassing extensive aspects of biomass-derived nanomaterials, a number of factors including size, shape, morphology and structure have also been summarized and discussed. In the end, an outlook on the opportunities and challenges in the future research on the beneficial exploitation of biomass is rendered.