Green synthesis of gold nanoparticles by thermophilic filamentous fungi

Alternative methods, including green synthetic approaches for the preparation of various types of nanoparticles are important to maintain sustainable development. Extracellular or intracellular extracts of fungi are perfect candidates for the synthesis of metal nanoparticles due to the scalability and cost efficiency of fungal growth even on industrial scale. There are several methods and techniques that use fungi-originated fractions for synthesis of gold nanoparticles. However, there is less knowledge about the drawbacks and limitations of these techniques. Additionally, identification of components that play key roles in the synthesis is challenging. Here we show and compare the results of three different approaches for the synthesis of gold nanoparticles using either the extracellular fraction, the autolysate of the fungi or the intracellular fraction of 29 thermophilic fungi. We observed the formation of nanoparticles with different sizes (ranging between 6 nm and 40 nm) and size distributions (with standard deviations ranging between 30% and 70%) depending on the fungi strain and experimental conditions. We found by using ultracentrifugal filtration technique that the size of reducing agents is less than 3 kDa and the size of molecules that can efficiently stabilize nanoparticles is greater than 3 kDa.