Durian waste mediated green synthesis of zinc oxide nanoparticles and evaluation of their antibacterial, antioxidant, cytotoxicity and photocatalytic activity

The synthesized ZnO NPs using durian rind in solution has shown maximum absorption at 355.5 nm with the bandgap of 3.33 eV, spectrophotometrically. SEM and TEM studies revealed that the shape of the synthesized ZnO NPs was spherical with an average size of 280 and 283 nm, respectively. However, DLS analysis of ZnO NPs revealed the average particle size of 456 d.nm. The presence of [100], [002], [101], [102], [110], [103], [200], [112] and [201] planes in XRD corroborate the formation of pure wurtzite structure of ZnO NPs. Synthesized ZnO NPs showed remarkable photocatalytic activity on degradation of methylene blue and sulfanilamide, antioxidant activity, considerable antimicrobial activity against Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus, and considerable cytotoxic activity against brine shrimp. The sulfanilamide degradation was found to be 96.70%, under natural sunlight and in the presence of 0.1% ZnO NPs at pH 10 with a time of 3 h. The dye degradation was found to be 84% under sunlight in the presence of 0.01% ZnO NPs at pH 10 with a time of 40 min. The synthesized ZnO NPs may be explored furthermore in the fields of wastewater treatment, biomedicine, biosensor, and nanotechnology.