The prevention of microbial surface contamination has become most crucial in today’s health care system, and in food and pharmaceutical production. Human beings are often infected by microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, and molds that often infect living environments. Silver nanoparticles or silver ions have been known to have strong inhibitory and bactericidal effects. Metallic nanopartic...

This review describes recent efforts on the synthesis, dispersion and surface functionalization of the three dominating oxide nanoparticles used for photocatalytic, UV-blocking and sunscreen applications: titania, zinc oxide, and ceria. The gas phase and liquid phase synthesis is described briefly and examples are given of how weakly aggregated photocatalytic or UV-absorbing oxide nanoparticles...

We present a promising first example towards controlling the properties of a self-assembling mineral film by means of the functionality and polarity of a substrate template. In the presented case, a zinc oxide film is deposited by chemical bath deposition on a nearly topography-free template structure composed of a pattern of two self-assembled monolayers with different chemical functionality. ...

Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) has been employed as a robust functional template for the fabrication of a TMV/zinc oxide field effect transistor (FET). A microwave based approach, under mild conditions was employed to synthesize stable zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles, employing a molecular precursor. Insightful studies of the decomposition of the precursor were done using NMR spectroscopy and materi...

A water-based solution of polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) at various concentrations and zinc nitrates were used in conjunction with calcination to produce zinc oxide semiconductor nanoparticles. The extent to which the zinc oxide semiconductor nanoparticles had become crystallized was measured using X-ray diffraction (XRD), whilst morphological characteristics were determined using scanning electron...

The effects of zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NPs) on the root growth, root apical meristem mitosis and mitotic aberrations of garlic (Allium sativum L.) were investigated. ZnO NPs caused a concentration-dependent inhibition of root length. When treated with 50 mg/L ZnO NPs for 24 h, the root growth of garlic was completely blocked. The 50% inhibitory concentration (IC(50)) was estimated to be 1...