Silver nanomaterials as future colorants and potential antimicrobial agents for natural and synthetic textile materials

Over the past few years, antimicrobial textiles have gained considerable interest for use in different application fields. Because of these reasons, a wide range of antimicrobial agents with diverse chemical structures such as quaternary ammonium compounds, N-halamine siloxanes, heterocyclic compounds with anionic groups, polybiguanides, triclosan, metal salts, and synthetic colorants have been used to impart antimicrobial properties to different textile materials. However, most of these antimicrobial agents suffer from many disadvantages such as action on non-target microorganisms, toxicity to the environment and low durability of antimicrobial finish. To overcome these problems, silver nanoparticles with strong cytotoxicity towards a broad range of microorganisms, low toxicity to human cells, high selectivity, long term durability, increased dyeability and biocompatibility are drawing a tremendous level of attention from both academic research and industry. Silver nanomaterials, due to their unique properties are particularly attractive for production of textiles surfaces with novel properties such UV protection, water resistant, self cleaning and antimicrobial activity. The present review is intended to describe recent advances about the use of silver nanomaterials as novel colorants and antimicrobial agents for different textiles materials. Finally it also highlights the current challenges and provides scope for future studies.