Breakthroughs for gold nanoparticles: Perspectives and applications

Nanoscience and nanotechnology are growing very quickly and potential applications of nanomaterials are envisaged in almost every field of research, ranging from optoelectronics to new materials, biotechnology and medicine. Although the idea that matter at smaller and smaller scales will exhibit unexpected features and properties has been proposed about 50 years ago by Feynman, only in recent years this field has been developed toughly. One of the main goals in nanoscience is to understand the behavior of materials when the sizes are close to atomic dimensions. The phenomena occurring at the nanoscale rise a wide interest and involve the research of physicists, chemists, biologists, engineers, and doctors. Among the variety of materials, interest in gold nanoparticles (AuNP) has grown exponentially in the past decades, due to the unique properties of gold nanoparticles. In this commentary the developments and future outlooks of gold nanoparticles will be reviewed, with particular attention to the different synthetic approaches leading to nanoparticles of different sizes and shapes. In fact, the performance of AuNPs, critically depends on their size, shape and composition. Clever chemical methods are available for the stabilization of metal nanoparticles, starting from synthetically or naturally occurring materials and in particular, the perspective of developing "green-chemical" methods has been proved. A glance on applications in optoelectronics, bio-catalysis and biomedicine will also be hold up in the Commentary. Special attention will be paid to AuNPs which exhibit a dramatic breakthrough in cancer therapy, since they can be designed to affect specific targets, such as tumor cells. Reports on these extremely important topics will be addressed. © 2011 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.