Call For Papers: MXene chemistries in biology, medicine and sensing

Guest edited by Yury Gogotsi, Lucia Gemma Delogu, Acelya Yilmazer and Maksym Pogorielov

We are delighted to announce a call for papers for our latest online themed collection in Nanoscale on MXene chemistries in biology, medicine and sensing that is being guest edited by Professors Yury Gogotsi (Drexel University, USA), Lucia Gemma Delogu (University of Padua, Italy and Khalifa University, United Arab Emirates), Acelya Yilmazer (Ankara University, Turkey) and Maksym Pogorielov (Sumy State University, Ukraine and University of Latvia, Latvia).

Materials play a pivotal role in driving the progress of humanity. From the silicon age, when electronic and computer technologies revolutionized our lives, to the present, where we stand on the cusp of the age of nanomaterials, such as MXenes. MXenes represent a very large class of inorganic materials with an unparalleled diversity of structures and compositions. This sets them apart as one of the most significant recent discoveries in materials science.

These two-dimensional inorganic compounds consist of atomically thin layers of transition metal carbides, nitrides, or carbonitrides. Their versatile chemistry and unique and highly tuneable physicochemical properties have propelled them into myriad applications across various fields, ranging from energy storage to electronics and medicine.

Multiple studies have demonstrated that several MXenes are biocompatible and non-toxic to living organisms, thereby opening a door for various biomedical applications. MXene-based materials offer unique advantages in biosensing, cancer research, and regenerative medicine. The list of medical scenarios is growing every day, from the treatment of cardiovascular diseases to immunology and neuroscience.

This special-themed collection aims to provide a platform to showcase the recent progress and challenges in the field of MXenes chemistries addressing the exciting current challenges in biology, medicine and sensing. The scope of the collection is broad, including but are not limited to:

• MXene biocompatibility
• MXenes for sensing (optical sensors, chemical sensors, biosensors, gas sensors, SERS, etc)
• MXenes in cancer research
• MXenes in immunology
• MXenes for drug delivery
• MXenes as diagnostic tools
• MXenes in regenerative medicine
• MXenes in microbiology and virology
• MXenes in bioelectronics

This call for papers is open for the following article types:

• Communications
• Full papers

Open for submissions until 30 September 2024

If you would like to contribute to this themed collection, you can submit your article directly through the Nanoscale online submission system. Please mention that this submission is an open call contribution to the MXene chemistries in biology, medicine and sensing collection in the “Themed issues” section of the submission form and add a “Note to the Editor” that this is from the Open Call. The Editorial Office reserves the right to check suitability of submissions in relation to the scope of both the journal and the collection, and inclusion of accepted articles in the final themed issue is not guaranteed.

Please also note that all submissions will undergo our normal rigorous peer review processes including an initial assessment prior to peer review, and that peer review and acceptance are not guaranteed.

If you have any questions about the journal or the collection, then Edward Gardner, the Development Editor for Nanoscale, would be happy to answer them. You can contact him by emailing the journal inbox.

With best wishes,

Professor Yury Gogotsi, Drexel University, USA (ORCID: 0000-0001-9423-4032)
Professor Lucia Gemma Delogu, University of Padua, Italy and Khalifa University, United Arab Emirates (ORCID: 0000-0002-2329-7260)
Professor Acelya Yilmazer, Ankara University, Turkey (ORCID: 0000-0003-2712-7450)
Professor Maksym Pogorielov, Sumy State University, Ukraine and University of Latvia, Latvia (ORCID: 0000-0001-9372-7791)

Read the collection in Nanoscale Advances

We are delighted to introduce our new themed collection focusing on nanomaterials for gas sensing and delivery!

Guest Edited by Dr Run Zhang (The University of Queensland, Australia) Dr Songjun Zeng (Hunan Normal University, China) and Associate Professor Rona Chandrawati (University of New South Wales, Australia)

This themed collection in Nanoscale Advances aims to provide a forum for recent trends in the rapidly evolving field of nanomaterials for gas sensing and delivery.

A small selection of the papers are featured below, all open access.

Graphene-based chemiresistive gas sensors
Patrick Recum and Thomas Hirsch
Nanoscale Adv., 2024, 6, 11-31. DOI: 10.1039/D3NA00423F

Embedding Pd into SnO₂ drastically enhances gas sensing
Katarzyna Jabłczyńska, Alexander Gogos, Christian M. P. Kubsch and Sotiris E. Pratsinis
Nanoscale Adv., 2024, 6, 1259-1268. DOI: 10.1039/ D3NA00558E

Role of graphene quantum dots with discrete band gaps on SnO₂ nanodomes for NO₂ gas sensors with an ultralow detection limit
Jinho Lee, Minsu Park, Young Geun Song, Donghwi Cho, Kwangjae Lee, Young-Seok Shim and Seokwoo Jeon
Nanoscale Adv., 2023, 5, 2767-2775. DOI: 10.1039/D2NA00925K

We hope you enjoy reading this themed collection!

Did you know?

At Nanoscale Advances, our themed collections are built by collaboration between our Guest Editors and expert Associate Editors. Our Guest Editors guide the scope and curate the contributions in our collections but all submissions are handled through peer review by our team of resident Associate Editors. This means that as an author you receive a consistent experience, and as a reader you can trust the quality of the science being presented.

If you have an idea for a topical collection in your research field, we’d love to hear from you! Get in touch here.

Celebrating the 150th anniversary of Vanderbilt University

Guest edited by De-en Jiang, Janet E. Macdonald and Sharon M. Weiss

We were delighted to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Vanderbilt University at the end of last year and into the start of 2024 with a special collection in Nanoscale Horizons, Nanoscale and Nanoscale Advances highlighting the breadth of high-quality work from the institute and commemorating the university’s sesquicentennial. We’re pleased to share this excellent collection of research and reviews with you, providing a snapshot of the nanoscale science and engineering research from Vanderbilt faculty, alumni, and collaborators in 2023 and 2024. We’re also delighted to showcase the work of Piran R. Kidambi et al, which featured on the cover of Nanoscale! You can explore the collection and read the introductory editorial from our guest editors below, with all articles free to access until the end of August 2024. Read the collection

Professors De-en Jiang, Janet Macdonald and Sharon Weiss served as guest editors for this collection and highlight the history of Vanderbilt University and the significance of the Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (VINSE) in their introductory editorial.

Read the introductory editorial

All of the articles in the collection are free to access until the end of August 2024. Read some of the featured articles below.

Phonon vortices at heavy impurities in two-dimensional materials De-Liang Bao, Mingquan Xu, Ao-Wen Li, Gang Su, Wu Zhou and Sokrates T. Pantelides Nanoscale Horiz., 2024, DOI: 10.1039/D3NH00433C

Role of carboxylates in the phase determination of metal sulfide nanoparticles Andrey A. Shults, Guanyu Lu, Joshua D. Caldwell and Janet E. Macdonald Nanoscale Horiz., 2023, DOI: 10.1039/D3NH00227F

Engineering endosomolytic nanocarriers of diverse morphologies using confined impingement jet mixing Hayden M. Pagendarm, Payton T. Stone, Blaise R. Kimmel, Jessalyn J. Baljon, Mina H. Aziz, Lucinda E. Pastora, Lauren Hubert, Eric W. Roth, Sultan Almunif, Evan A. Scott and John T. Wilson Nanoscale, 2023, DOI: 10.1039/D3NR02874G

Hyperspectral mapping of nanoscale photophysics and degradation processes in hybrid perovskite at the single grain level Ethan J. Taylor, Vasudevan Iyer, Bibek S. Dhami, Clay Klein, Benjamin J. Lawrie and Kannatassen Appavoo Nanoscale Adv., 2023, DOI: 10.1039/D3NA00529A

Nanoscale Horizons and Nanoscale are high-impact international journals, publishing high-quality experimental and theoretical work across the breadth of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Nanoscale Advances is our gold open access member of the nanoscale journal family. Our broad scope covers cross-community research that bridges various disciplines, and the journal series allows full coverage of interdisciplinary advances in nanoscience and nanotechnology. We hope you will consider Nanoscale Horizons, Nanoscale and Nanoscale Advances for your future submissions.

We hope you enjoy reading this collection and look forward to showcasing more work from Vanderbilt faculty and alumni in the future. Please continue to submit your exciting work to Nanoscale Horizons, Nanoscale and Nanoscale Advances.

We are delighted to announce an open call for papers to our new themed collection on Synthesis, physical properties and applications of advanced nanocrystalline materials.

Loosely connected to the Spring E-MRS 2024 Symposium by the same name (more information here) the following topics are welcome:

• Magnetic, Luminescent, Electrical, and Structural Properties of Nanoparticles
• Synthesis and Characterization of Nanocrystals
• Magnetic Nanoparticles
• Semiconductor Nanocrystals
• Nanocrystalline Metals
• Two-dimensional Nanostructures Such as Graphene, MXene, etc.
• Biomedical applications of Nanoparticles
• Nanocrystalline Material-based Sensors, Actuators, and Other Devices
• Theory and Simulation of Nanocrystalline Materials
• Nanocrystal Thin Films and Their Applications
• Advanced Nanocrystalline Materials for Environmental Applications
• Advanced Nanocrystalline Materials for Energy Applications

This collection welcomes fundamental and applied works including process-structure-property relationships of advanced nanocrystalline materials exhibiting efficient magnetic, luminescent, optical, electrical, dielectric, thermoelectric, piezoelectric and other physical characteristics.

Submit before 1st December 2024.

If you are interested in contributing to this collection, please get in touch with the Editorial Office. Submissions are welcome to both Nanoscale and Nanoscale Advances.

Please note that article processing charges apply to all articles submitted to Nanoscale Advances if, following peer-review, they are accepted for publication, unless your institute has an existing agreement with the RSC that covers publications in our gold open access journals. Details of the APC and discounted rates can be found here. Corresponding authors who are not already members of the Royal Society of Chemistry are entitled to one year’s Affiliate membership as part of their APC. Find out more about our member benefits. There are no costs associated with submitting to Nanoscale unless you wish to publish under an open access license.

This themed collection is Guest Edited by:

	Aurora Rizzo University of Salento – CNR NANOTEC, Italy ORCID: 0000-0002-4570-7777 Aurora received a Ph.D. degree in innovative materials and technologies from National Nanotechnology Laboratory (NNL), Università del Salento, CNR-INFM, Lecce. In the period 2008−2009, she joined the group of Prof. Olle Inganäs at the University of Linköping (Sweden), working on “Bio-Organic Light Emitting Diodes.” She is currently a researcher at the Nanotechnology Institute of the National Research Council (CNR), Lecce, Italy. Aurora Rizzo research interests include the design and developed of innovative hybrid inorganic–organic and 2D materials, such as metal halide perovskites, colloidal nanocrystals, and transition metal dichalcogenides for third generation solar cells, optic and optoelectronic devices.
	Ermelinda M. S. Macoas University of Lisbon, Portugal ORCID: 0000-0001-8506-7025 Ermelinda received her PhD in Chemistry in 2005, in the field of physical-chemistry, by the University of Coimbra. She then took on a post-doc fellowship at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Coimbra (2008) and a Marie-Curie fellow at the University of Jyväskylä (2006-2007, Finland). Since 2009, she has been a senior researcher at the Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon. As a young researcher she received the scientific investigation stimulus prize of the Gulbenkian Foundation (2005). Her research field is in fundamental photochemistry and photophysics with special relevance to practical aspects of energy and charge transfer processes, such as: selective photochemistry connected to isomerization and molecular photocontrol issues, nonlinear fluorescent molecular materials tailored for applications as dyes in bioimaging, FRET based 3D-data storage media, photophysics and photoconductivity of molecular single crystals and single crystal interfaces with applications in solar energy conversion and organic electronics, intramolecular proton tunneling and excited state dynamics of organic molecules and metal complexes. The tools used to address these topics are steady-state and time resolved optical spectroscopy (including UV-Vis, NIR and mid-IR; from fs to microseconds), fluorescence microscopy and electronic structure calculations.
	Raghvendra Singh Yadav Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Czech Republic ORCID: 0000-0003-1773-3596 Dr. Raghvendra Singh Yadav is a Senior Scientist at Tomas Bata University in Zlin. He has published more than 74 publications in reputed international journals, as well as six books and two book chapters in the field of materials science and nanotechnology. Dr.Yadav has been also involved as Editorial Board Member in several journals, namely Crystals, International Journal of Molecular Sciences, Nanomaterials, Frontiers in Materials. His research activities are focused on ‘‘Lightweight, Flexible, Low-dimensional Electromagnetic Functional Nanocomposite Materials (MXene, MBene, Graphene, magnetic nanoparticles as nanofillers in a polymer matrix) and its Applications’’
	Renjie Chen Beijing Institute of Technology, P. R. China ORCID: 0000-0002-7001-2926 Renjie Chen is a Professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT). His research focuses on electrochemical energy storage and conversion technology. He was a post-doctoral fellow in Department of Chemistry at Tsinghua University and a visiting professor in Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at University of Cambridge. As the principal investigator, Prof. Chen successfully hosted the National Key Research and Development Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, National High Tech 863 project etc. He has (co-) authored more than 200 research papers and filed 50 patents and patent applications.
	Tayebeh Ameri University of Kiel, Germany ORCID: 0000-0002-8928-3697 Tayebeh Ameri conducted her Ph.D. research on printed tandem organic photovoltaics at Konarka GmbH Austria and received her Ph.D. degree in Engineering Science from Johannes Kepler University Linz in 2010. Afterwards, she conducted her postdoctoral and Habilitation research, where she pioneered the development of ternary organic and hybrid photovoltaics at the Institute of Materials for Electronics and Energy Technology (i-MEET), Department of Material Science and Engineering at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). From 2018 to 2020, Ameri served as a team leader and lecturer (Privatdozent) in the Department of Physical Chemistry at the University of Munich (LMU). From December 2020 to July 2023, Ameri worked as a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Institute for Materials and Processes, Chemical Engineering discipline at the University of Edinburgh. During this period, her research focused on the development of emerging energy harvesting, energy storage, and detection/sensing technologies, including photovoltaics, supercapacitors, and photo-/IR-detectors. Since September 2023, Ameri has been a full Heisenberg professor and holds the Chair for Composite Materials in the Faculty of Engineering, Department of Materials Science at Kiel University. She has the honor of furthering her research as an honorary lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Ameri is also the co-founder and scientific mentor of the start-up SERINO, founded by the Medical Valley Award in 2021 and expanded by EXIST grant in 2023 to develop the next generation of IR-detectors for food and medical applications.

Open Call for Papers – Chiral Nanomaterials

Guest Edited by David Amabilino, Jeanne Crassous, Pengfei Duan and Nicholas Kotov

Chiral Nanomaterials have gone from being largely anecdotal curiosities to sophisticated materials with distinctively strong polarization rotation that had become an enabler for the areas, such as biosensing, catalysis and displays.  Chiral nanostructures also have enormous potential in emerging technologies related with biomedicine, optoelectronics, spintronics, and information technologies.  The great progress in the last two decades on the synthesis of chiral nanocolloids and their assemblies, chiral porous materials, chiral clusters, chiral soft nanostructured materials and chiral composites, to name a few, have made possible the discovery of new physical phenomena such as those related to the enhanced light-matter interactions and tunable Cosserat-Cauchy mechanics.

This special themed collection in Nanoscale, guest edited by Professor David Amabilino (ICMAB, Spain), Professor Jeanne Crassous (CNRS Institut des Sciences Chimiques de Rennes, France), Professor Pengfei Duan (NCNST, China) and Professor Nicholas Kotov (University of Michigan, USA), aims to provide a platform to showcase the latest progress and challenges in chiral nanomaterials. The scope of the collection is broad, including but not limited to, the following topics;

• Novel synthesis strategies
• Self-assembled chiral nanomaterials
• Chiral nanoparticles and plasmonics
• Complex chiral materials
• Bioinspired chiral nanostructures
• Porous chiral nanostructures
• Theoretical understanding of the chiral materials
• New chirality and asymmetry measures
• Materials with chirality continuum
• Spectroscopy of chiral nanomaterials
• Terahertz and long-wave circular dichroism
• Advanced characterization techniques
• Chirality Induced Spin Selectivity
• Chiral catalysis
• Biosensors
• Light emitting devices
• Chiral metastructures

Submissions deadline 6 September 2024

How to submit

Submissions to the collection should fit within the scope of Nanoscale – Please see the journals’ websites for more information on the journal’s scope, standards, article types and author guidelines. All manuscripts will undergo the normal initial assessment and peer review processes, if appropriate, in line with the journal’s high standards, managed by the journal editors. Accepted manuscripts will be added to the online collection as soon as they are published and they will be featured in a regular issue of the relevant journal. Please note that peer review or acceptance are not guaranteed. 

If you would like to contribute to this themed collection, please submit your article directly through the journal submissions platform. Please mention that your submission is a contribution to the Chiral Nanomaterials collection in the “Themed issues” section of the submission form and is in response to the Open Call. The Editorial Office reserves the right to check suitability of submissions in relation to the scope of both the journal and the collection, and as such inclusion of accepted articles in the final themed collection is not guaranteed.

If you have any questions about the collection or the submissions process, please do contact the Editorial Office at nanoscale-rsc@rsc.org.

We look forward to receiving your latest work and considering it for this collection!

Read the collection in Nanoscale Advances

We are delighted to introduce our new themed collection focusing on smart tailored nanomaterials!

Guest Edited by Professor Chiara Battocchio (Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy), Professor Ilaria Fratoddi (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy), and Professor Barbara Capone (Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy).

This collection focuses on the design, synthesis and advanced characterizations of functional nanostructured materials, e.g. metal, metal oxides, and hybrid nanoparticles by means of state-of-the-art spectroscopic and imaging techniques.

A small selection of the papers are featured below, all open access and free to read.

Colloidal adsorption in planar polymeric brushes
Clemens Franz Vorsmann, Sara Del Galdo, Barbara Capone and Emanuele Locatelli
Nanoscale Adv., 2024,6, 816-825, DOI: 10.1039/D3NA00598D

Microwave synthesis of antimony oxide graphene nanoparticles – a new electrode material for supercapacitors
Precious Ekwere, Miranda Ndipingwi, Christopher Nolly, Chinwe Ikpo and Emmanuel Iwuoha
Nanoscale Adv., 2023,5, 5137-5153, DOI: 10.1039/D3NA00514C

Copper(i) as a reducing agent for the synthesis of bimetallic PtCu catalytic nanoparticles
Adrián Fernández-Lodeiro, Javier Fernández Lodeiro, Noelia Losada-Garcia, Silvia Nuti, José Luis Capelo-Martinez, Jose M. Palomo and Carlos Lodeiro
Nanoscale Adv., 2023,5, 4415-4423, DOI: 10.1039/D3NA00158J

We hope you enjoy reading this themed collection!

Did you know?

At Nanoscale Advances, our themed collections are built by collaboration between our Guest Editors and expert Associate Editors. Our Guest Editors guide the scope and curate the contributions in our collections but all submissions are handled through peer review by our team of resident Associate Editors. This means that as an author you receive a consistent experience, and as a reader you can trust the quality of the science being presented.

If you have an idea for a topical collection in your research field, we’d love to hear from you! Get in touch here.