In recent years, the number of people suffering from cancer and multidrug-resistant infections has sharply increased, leaving humanity without any choice but to search for new treatment options and strategies. Although cancer is considered the leading cause of death worldwide, it also paves the way many microbial infections and thus increases this burden manifold. Development of small molecules as anticancer and anti-microbial agents has great potential and a plethora of drugs are already available to combat these diseases. However, the wide occurrence of multidrug resistance in both cancer and microbial infections necessitates the development of new and potential molecules with desired properties that could circumvent the multidrug resistance problem. A successful strategy in anticancer chemotherapy has been the use of metallo-drugs and this strategy has the potential to be used for treating multidrug-resistant infections more efficiently. As a class of molecules, Schiff bases have been the topic of considerable interest, owing to their versatile metal chelating properties, inherent biological activities and flexibility to modify the structure to fine-tune it for a particular biological application. Schiff base-based metallo-drugs are being researched to develop new anticancer and anti-microbial chemotherapies and because both anticancer and anti-microbial targets are different, heterocyclic Schiff bases can be structurally modified to achieve the desired molecule, targeting a particular disease. In this review, we collect the most recent and relevant literature concerning the synthesis of heterocyclic Schiff base metal complexes as anticancer and anti-microbial agents and discuss the potential and future of this class of metallo-drugs as either anticancer or anti-microbial agents.

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In this paper we report the effect of aniline concentrations on the growth and size of silver nanocrystals using aniline and silver nitrate as reductant and oxidant, respectively. UV-Vis spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and selected areas electron diffraction (SAED) have been employed to characterize silver nanoparticles. The TEM images show that silver nanocrystals are roughly spherical and of uniform particle size, and the average particle size is ca. 25 nm. A broad surface plasmon resonance band appears at 400 nm. The rings patterns are in good agreement with the standard values of the facecentered-cubic form of silver nanocrystals. This is attributed to the adsorption of aniline and /or interparticle interaction onto the surface of Ag-nanocrystals through electrostatic interactions between the lone-pairs electrons of -NH 2 and positive surface of Ag-nanoparticles.