Monitoring and stimulating in biological systems are strongly dependent on the nature of the interfaces between biological systems and devices; in addition, one-dimensional nanostructures show high-charge accumulation at their surfaces which result in forming a conductive pathway between devices and cells. ZnO nanostructures because of their dual semiconducting properties and their piezoelectricity show a great potential to deploy in optoelectronic devices, biosensors and transducers in biological systems. For this purpose, we introduced a novel one-step hydrothermal nanowire array fabrication and compared it with ZnO nanorods array and ZnO compact film. Grazing incidence X-ray Diffraction (GIXRD), field-emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM), disperse X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) detector and inductively couples plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) were used for physical and chemical characterizations of the arrays. In addition, we investigated the ability of zinc oxide nanostructures to control cell adhesion and viability of neuron-like PC12 cells. Furthermore, we examined the zinc oxide solubility and our results indicated that cytotoxicity were occurred in 2.23 ± 0.41 µg/ml concentration of zinc ions which was much less than the safe amount of zinc ions (10.23 ± 0.41 µg/ml) reported in previous studies. It is believed that ZnO dissociation behavior crucially affects cell fates even in rare amounts.