We investigated the influence of the ZnO coating on the properties of one-dimensional (ID) nanostructures of SnO2. We have employed X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscope, transmission electron microscope and photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy to characterize both as-synthesized and ZnO-coated products. We observed that deposition process of ZnO by using an atomic layer deposition technique resulted in the SnO2 core/ZnO shell structure. The photoluminescence of the ZnO-coated products exhibited broad bands in the UV and green region, suggesting a possible contribution of the emission from the ZnO outlayers. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.