Hydroxyethyl cellulose for spontaneous synthesis of antipathogenic nanostructures: (Ag & Au) nanoparticles versus Ag-Au nano-alloy.

The current approach represents a controllable strategy for studying the antipathogenic effects against selected bacterial strains and fungi for silver nanoparticles and gold nanoparticles versus their bimetallic nano-alloys spontaneously prepared by the same technique. Spontaneous ingraining of silver and gold based monometallic and bimetallic nano-objects was carried out by employing organic polymer of hydroxyethyl cellulose which was presumed to play the dual role of nanogenerator and surfactant, via seed mediated growth technique. Revolution of UV-Visible spectroscopy revealed that, the characteristic surface plasmon resonance (SPR) peak for Ag-Au bimetallic nano-alloy was detected at 480-495 nm and X-ray diffraction patterns confirmed the successive role of HEC in generation of bimetallic nanostructures. Transmission electron microscope (TEM) and zetasizer data were detected for clarifying the effect of the polymer concentration, addition sequencing of metal salts in reaction liquor, and reaction temperature on the morphological features and size distribution of the as-produced bimetallic nano-alloy. Referring to zetasizer analyses and TEM micrographs, small sized (10.7 nm) Ag-Au bimetallic nano-alloy was successfully produced by employing HEC as nano-producer. All the generated bimetallic nano-objects exhibited high stability with PdI ranged in 0.268-0.560. The mechanism for generation of nanostructures was confirmed according to FT-IR, 1HNMR and13CNMR spectra.