Nano-science and nano-technology has opened up new vistas in almost all fields including potential applications chemistry and biology. Exciting possibilities of combining biology and nanoscale technology hold the potential of emerging as a new discipline.  Metal and Semiconductor nano-particles have proven most useful in catalytic, biological and optoelectronic applications including detection of very small amounts of a chemical contaminant, virus or bacteria in food systems, bio-medical imaging, removal of pollutants, etc. There has been a tremendous interest in growth of chalcogenide nano-materials of varied shapes over last two decades with varied range of size and compositions [1]. Chalcogenide semiconductor nanoparticles and their self-assembly structures have become the most explored group of semiconductor nanomaterials due to the interesting physics involved in quantum confinement, surface chemistry and variety of applications including bio-sensing, bio-imaging and reduction of microbial toxicity. In the last couple of decades, facile routes for their synthesis and strategies for controlling the size, shape and morphology have been reported.  In the present talk, we shall mainly focus on synthesis strategies of size and shape and morphology controlled nanoparticles belonging to II-VI group of semiconductor chalcogenides by optimizing the process parameters and evaluating their effect on nucleation and growth. Role of pH, molar ratio and concentration of precursors along with reaction temperature that affect the nucleation and growth of nanoparticles shall be discussed at length. Emphasis will be on new and facile single molecular precursor based noble routes that use non-pyrophoric, low temperature and non-toxic chemicals [2] to synthesize nanoparticles and self-assemblies of CdSe, CdTe, HgTe and ZnSe and discuss their properties and synthesis scheme as future development in this field. Advances in controlling the size and shape of copper sulfides nano-particles [3-4] which are considered as visible light active semiconductor for use in the field of pollutant treatment, attractive for biological applications and recent applications of chalcogenides QDs in the fields of bio-sensing and bio-imaging shall also be  discussed.