Journal of Materials Chemistry Blog

Microbial contamination is a tremendous problem in our society nowadays. ZnO is extensively used as a universal inorganic antibacterial reagent in the food industry, however, few reports related to antibacterial function of ZnS have been published up to date. 

Erkang Wang and colleagues in China have developed a facile one-pot method to prepare complex three-dimensional ZnS nanospheres with good water-dispersibility and uniform size.  The obtained ZnS nanospheres exhibited high performance in prohibiting the growth of the foodborne pathogen Escherichia coli and negligible mammalian cell toxicity.

Interested to know more?  Read the full article.

Gaiping Li, Junfeng Zhai, Dan Li, Xiaona Fang, Hong Jiang, Qingzhe Dong and Erkang Wang*
J. Mater. Chem., 2010, Advance Article, DOI:10.1039/C0JM01776K Paper

The ability to organize functional materials into different types of hierarchical architectures is of paramount importance to nanomaterials research.  A solution-based method to synthesize cobalt nanofibers into pine-tree-leaf hierarchical superstructures has been described by researchers in Singapore.

Hua Chun Zeng and Cheng Chao Li showed that metallic papers made from these lightweight nanofibers are magnetically responsive and display an extraordinary ultrahydrophobicity (water contact angle 172.3°).

Because of their unique structural features and other physicochemical properties, the cobalt nanofibers may find new applications in the near future.

Cheng Chao Li and Hua Chun Zeng*
J. Mater. Chem., 2010, Advance Article
DOI:10.1039/C0JM01621G Paper 

Interested in knowing more?  Read the full article here.

The synthesis, characterization and thermotropic properties of novel asymmetrically substituted discotic molecules, perylene diester benzimidazoles (PDBIs), are presented in this paper by Mukundan Thelakkat and co-workers in Germany.

These discotic molecules self-organize into columnar superstructures and their absorption is extended to longer wavelengths in the visible regime up to 680 nm. 

These properties make n-type semiconducting PDBIs promising candidates for applications in organic electronics in areas such as light emitting diodes, field effect transistors or photovoltaic devices.

Interested to know more?  Read the article online here.

André Wicklein, Mathis-Andreas Muth and Mukundan Thelakkat
J. Mater. Chem., 2010, Advance Article DOI:10.1039/C0JM01626H, Paper

The development of fast and efficient methods to separate proteins of interest from a biological source remains a challenging task in the proteomic era. With the use of magnetic nanoparticles, the separation of proteins can be significantly simplified by applying an external magnetic field.

Nanfeng Zheng and co-workers have prepared superparamagnetic core-shell Fe₃O₄@SiO₂@poly(styrene-alt-maleic acid)/Ni-NTA particles having abundant Ni-NTA binding sites for the efficient separation of His-tagged proteins. The shell composition of poly(styrene-alt-maleic anhydride) allows the incorporation of more Ni-NTA affinity sites onto the surface of the magnetic spheres making them particularly promising for the magnetic separation of low-concentration His-tagged proteins.

Interested to know more? Read the full article here:

Superparamagnetic core-shell polymer particles for efficient purification of his-tagged proteins
Weijun Fang, Xiaolan Chen and Nanfeng Zheng
J. Mater. Chem., 2010, Advance Article
DOI:10.1039/C0JM02081H. Paper

Bo Brummerstedt Iversen discusses β-Zn4Sb3 as a thermoelectric material. Zn4Sb3 is an excellent thermoelectric material made of cheap, “non-toxic” elements, but behind the simple formula hides a very complex truth.

The β-phase of Zn4Sb3 was rediscovered as a very promising thermoelectric material in the mid-nineties. The material seemed to have it all: a very high thermoelectric figure of merit in the technologically important mid-temperature region (200–400 °C), potential for further optimization through doping and best of all it was made of cheap, “non-toxic” and abundant elements…

Interested to know more? Read the full article here:

Recent years have seen the discovery of fascinating electronic properties in Prussian blue analogues and derivatives making them appealing candidates for the realization of molecular devices. Their successful integration into real applications however depends on a further processing step allowing the control of their size, shape and spatial organization at the surface or within a solid matrix.

Here, Anne Bleuzen and co-workers report an original strategy allowing the controlled precipitation of Prussian blue analogues and derivatives within the well-defined porosity of ordered mesoporous silica monoliths exhibiting various structures. This synthetic route offers great potentials for the study of Prussian blue derived particles as a function of their size, their shape and even their orientation in magnetic or electric fields.

Interested to know more? Read the full article here:
Pierrick Durand, Giulia Fornasieri, Cédric Baumier, Patricia Beaunier, Dominique Durand, Eric Rivière and Anne Bleuzen, J. Mater. Chem., 2010, DOI: 10.1039/C0JM01552K

Controlled release technology could provide a universal solution to the problems of patient compliance and sub-optimal dosing that often plague modern pharmaceuticals. Yet, harnessing this potential requires the ability to design drug delivery formulations which satisfy specific dosing schedules. 

This review intends to portray how material properties, processing methods and mathematical models can serve as effective tools for rationally tuning the duration and rate of drug release from biodegradable polymer matrices.

Read the full article here: Sam N. Rothstein and Steven R. Little, J. Mater. Chem., 2010, DOI: 10.1039/C0JM01668C

Arash Mohammadpour and Karthik Shankar from the University of Alberta, Canada, report the fabrication and optical properties of very large diameter titanium dioxide nanotube arrays with inner diameters as large as 900 nm. This surpasses the largest inner diameter reported thus far for anodically formed self-organized TiO2 nanotubes by a factor of 2.5.

Read the full article here:

A red-emitting molecular europium(III) complex has been doped into liquid-crystalline (LC) physical gels consisting of 4-pentyl-4′-cyanobiphenyl (5CB) with amino acid-based gelators. Light scattering cells on the basis of these LC physical gels could be switched between a non-transparent off-state and a transparent on-state by on–off application of electric fields. The gels produced intense red light when they were irradiated with UV-light.

Interested to know more? Read the full article here:

This feature article reviews Nanoporous Molecular Crystals (NMCs), which are nanoporous materials composed of discrete molecules between which there are only non-covalent interactions—i.e. they do not possess an extended framework composed of covalent or coordination bonds.

Interested to know more? Read the full article here: