Tropical Journal of Pharmaceutical Research

Original Research Article | OPEN ACCESS

Green Synthesis of Silver Nanoparticles Induced by the Fungus Penicillium citrinum

Soheyla Honary¹ , Hamed Barabadi¹, Eshrat Gharaei-Fathabad¹, Farzaneh Naghibi²

¹Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences, School of pharmacy, Sari; ²School of Traditional Medicine, Shaheed Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.

For correspondence:- Soheyla Honary Email: shonary@mazums.ac.ir Tel:+00989121452220

Received: 5 April 2012 Accepted: 4 December 2012 Published: 21 February 2013

Citation: Honary S, Barabadi H, Gharaei-Fathabad E, Naghibi F. Green Synthesis of Silver Nanoparticles Induced by the Fungus Penicillium citrinum. Trop J Pharm Res 2013; 12(1):7-11 doi: 10.4314/tjpr.v12i1.2

© 2013 The authors.
This is an Open Access article that uses a funding model which does not charge readers or their institutions for access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read), which permit unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited..

Abstract

Purpose: To evaluate a green process for the extracellular production of silver (Ag) nanoparticles synthesized and stabilized using Penicillium citrinum isolated from soil.

Methods: The pure colonies of Penicillium citrinum were cultured in Czapek dox broth. The supernatant of the broth was examined for the ability to produce silver nanoparticles. The reactions were performed in a dark compartment at 28 ºC. After 24 h, the synthesized silver nanoparticles were filtered through a membrane filter (0.45 μ) and characterized by UV-visible spectroscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy, photon correlation spectroscopy (PCS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) for particle size, shape and the presence of different functional groups in the nanoparticles.

Results: The silver nanoparticles formed were fairly uniform in size with a spherical shape and a Z-average diameter of 109 nm. FTIR spectra revealed the presence of amide linkage groups which were also found in the fungal extract itself.

Conclusion: The current approach suggests that rapid synthesis of nanoparticles of silver nitrate would be suitable for developing a biological process for mass scale production of formulations.

Keywords: Green synthesis, Penicillium citrinum, silver nanoparticles