The development of rapid and reliable processes for the synthesis of nanosized materials is of great importance in the field of nanotechnology. Synthesis of silver nanoparticles using microorganism have been reported, but the process is rather slow. In this paper, we describe a novel combinatorial synthesis approach which is rapid, simple and “green” for the synthesis of metallic nanostructures of noble metals such as silver (Ag), by using a combination of culture supernatanant ofBacillus subtilisand microwave (MW) irradiation in water in absence of a surfactant or soft template. It was found that exposure of culture supernatanant ofBacillus subtilisand microwave irradiation to silver ion lead to the formation of silver nanoparticles. The silver nanoparticles were in the range of 5-60 nm in dimension. The nanoparticles were examined using UV-Visible Spectroscopy, and Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) analyses. The formation of nanoparticles by this method is extremely rapid, requires no toxic chemicals and the nanoparticles are stable for several months. The main conclusion is that the bio-reduction method to produce nanoparticles is a good alternative to the electrochemical methods.

Polymers have been molecularly imprinted for the purpose of binding specifically toα-tocotrienol (vitamin E). A molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) material was prepared usingα-tocotrienol as the imprinted molecule, acrylamide as functional monomer and macroporous chitosan beads as functional matrix. Chitosan-graft-polyacrylamide was synthesized without any radical initiator or catalyst using microwave (MW) irradiation. The representative microwave synthesized graft copolymer was characterized by fourier transform-infrared spectroscopy, taking chitosan as a reference. Microwave irradiation was exploited for polyacrylamide grafting on the cross-linked chitosan beads to produce MIP, where both time as well as chemicals can be saved. It can be assumed that the chitosan coated polyacrylamide MIP will have better pH stability and enhanced adsorption capacity. The maximum adsorption capacity was observed to be 3.95 mg/g of MIP, which gave removal efficiency of 93%. After 4 h, the change of adsorption capacities forα-tocotrienol did not show notable effects. The Langmuir and Freundlich adsorption models were also applied to describe the equilibrium isotherms.