Eco-friendly protocols are processes that include developing green materials and safe conditions such
as using biodegradable polymers and complete biological components for waste reduction. As a
result, biopolymers have attracted both academic and industrial interests (Sinha Ray, 2013). Cellulose
production reaches to approximately 700 billion tons each year (Xu, Chen, Rosswurm, Yao, &
Janaswamy, 2016). Diverse benefits of cellulose such as biocompatibility, biodegradability and low
toxicity make it a good alternative to petroleum byproducts (Klemm, Heublein, Fink, & Bohn, 2005).
Biopolymers and inorganic materials affected and improved the multifunctional properties of
cellulose-based hybrids (Dong, Deng, et al., 2014). Lately, as a sustainable alternative of fossil feed
stocks, lignocelluloses have attracted considerable attentions of researchers (Dong, Li, Ma, Yao, &
Sun, 2014). The most plentiful biopolymer on the Earth is cellulose that can be used as an eco-
friendly polymer (Khalil, Bhat, & Yusra, 2012, Y. Feng, Zhang, He, & Zhang, 2016, Li et al., 2015).
Nevertheless, it is not easy to use cellulose as a matrix of polymer composites. Cellulose is neither
meltable nor soluble in common solvents. Therefore, developing new methods to solve cellulose are
required to utilize the natural cellulose (Hameed, Guo, Tay, & Kazarian, 2011; X. Zhang, Liu, Zheng,
& Zhu, 2012). Biopolymers are one of the most prevalent options to produce polymeric
nanocomposites with diverse applications (Kushwaha, Avadhani, & Singh, 2015; Singh & Kushwaha,
2013; Song et al., 2015). Also, the separation of these kind of nanocomposites from the reaction
media could be fast and easy (Kalkan, Aksoy, Aksoy, & Hasirci, 2012; Shi, Ma, Han, Zhang, & Yu,
2014; Wang, Guo, Yang, & Liu, 2010, Klemm, Heublein, Fink, & Bohn, 2005, Fu, Yao, Shi, Ma, &
Zhao, 2014). Accordingly, many researches have focused in this area.
To reach the specific purposes, metal nanocomposites can be used in large scale. Silver-based
nanocomposites have a wide verity of applications in different fields such as textile (Agarwal, Garg,
Kashyap, & Chauhan, 2015), biosensor (D.Q. Feng, Liu, & Wang, 2015), water treatment (Ramana,
Yu, & Seshaiah, 2013; Sumesh, Bootharaju, & Pradeep, 2011), wood dressing (Chakraborty &
Mascharak, 2015) and food packaging (Bott & Tadjiki, 2013). Recently, a magnetic antimicrobial
nanocomposite based on bacterial cellulose and silver nanoparticles has been reported (Sureshkumar,
Siswanto, & Lee, 2010). They have used dopamine as a coating agent on the bacterial cellulose to
stabilize the antibacterial Ag nanoparticles. However, there have been some problems such as
expensive preparation method and considerable loss of the magnetic properties.
In recent years, using nanocomposites in organic reactions as catalysts is a fast-growing field.
Pyridine is one of the most important heterocyclic structures in organic chemistry. The cyanopyridine
scaffold exists in many naturally occurring and synthetic compounds (Banothu, Bavantula, & Crooks,
2013). Moreover, 3-cyanopyridine derivatives play a significant role in the pharmaceutical industries,
because of their wide range of applications such as antitumor, analgesic, anti-inflammatory,
antipyretic, antimicrobial and cardiotonic activities (Bekhit & Baraka, 2005; Manna et al., 1992; F.
Zhang et al., 2011). Various techniques have been developed for the synthesis of coumarin The
improvement of effective coumarins synthetic methods are highly important in synthetic and
medicinal chemistry (Ghashang, Aswin, & Mansoor, 2013, Zhou, Gong, & Zhu, 2009; Zhou, Song,
Lv, Gong, & Tu, 2009). In connection with our previous works on magnetic nanobiocomposite
catalysts (Maleki & Kamalzare, 2014; Maleki, Movahed, & Paydar, 2016; Maleki & Paydar, 2015),
herein, we first synthesized 3-acetylecoumarin 3 from the reaction of salicylaldehyde 1 and methyl
acetoacetate 2 in the presence of a catalytic amount of dimethylamine (Scheme 1). Then, the
compound 3 was used as a starting material beside aryl aldehydes 4, malononitrile 5 and ammonium
acetate 6 in a multicomponent reaction which led to the formation of 2-amino-6-(2-oxo-2H-chromen-
3-yl)-4-phenylnicotinonitrile derivatives 7a-l in the presence of a catalytic amount of magnetic
cellulose/Ag nanobiocomposite.