Nanoscale & Nanoscale Advances Blog

Functionalised graphene nanosheets have been produced in a green, fast and controllable method by scientists in China. The team used aqueous polycation electrolyte branch poly(ethylenimine) as both a stabiliser and a reducing agent to make the graphene nanosheets, which displayed high solubility and long-term stability in aqueous solution.

The nanosheets did not aggregate and they could be dispersed in aqueous solutions, alkaline solutions, salt solutions and organic solvents. The nanosheets can be used as effective and controllable building templates for applications in various fields, they say.

Read this HOT research in Nanoscale today:

Highly concentrated polycations-functionalized graphene nanosheets with excellent solubility and stability, and its fast，facile and controllable assembly of multiple nanoparticles
Zhaozi Lv, Xuan Yang and Erkang Wang
DOI: 10.1039/C2NR33395C

Diatoms are photosynthetic microorganisms, found in marine and fresh water environments, which possess a porous silica exoskeleton called a frustule. Scientists in Australia and Canada coated the frustule with titanium dioxide nanoparticles – well known for their light harvesting properties – and incorporated the resulting material into dye sensitised solar cells (DSSCs). The DSSCs containing the frustules showed an efficiency increase of 30% compared to the titania coating alone, which the authors attribute to enhanced light scattering and trapping. The synthetic procedure is also inexpensive and simple.

Read the full details of this exciting Nanoscale communication today:

Diatom frustules as light traps enhance DSSC efficiency
Jeremiah Toster, K. Swaminathan Iyer, Wanchun Xiang, Federico Rosei, Leone Spiccia and Colin L. Raston
DOI: 10.1039/C2NR32716C

Folding DNA to make new nanoscale shapes – so called DNA origami – has potential applications including in drug delivery and immobilising enzymes. The 7249 nucleotide-long M13mp18 strand is frequently used in DNA origami, but it is expensive, its long length makes it more prone to strand cleavage and it can be difficult to analyse on the molecular level.

Scientists in Germany have come up with a convenient method for making a 704 nucleotide-long fragment, which is suitable for making small origami structures, is large enough to analyse by TEM and is more affordable.

Read this HOT Nanoscale article in full today:

M1.3 – A Small Scaffold for DNA Origami
Clemens Richert, Hassan Said, Verena Schüller, Fabian Eber, Christina Wege and Tim Liedl
DOI: 10.1039/C2NR32393A

Researchers based at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have prepared a  composite electrode of organic–inorganic polymers and Pyronin Y-doped silica nanoparticles, which was coated with poly (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT), in the presence of phosphododecamolybdic acid (PMo₁₂).

The fluoresence of the nanoparticles can be switched on and off in aqueous solution by oxidation and reduction of the PEDOT, with fast colouration and bleaching of the film.

The materials have potential applications in organic LEDs and other photoelectric devices.

Reversible electroswitchable luminescence in thin films of organic–inorganic hybrid assemblies
Yanling Zhai, Lihua Jin, Chengzhou Zhu, Peng Hu, Lei Han, Erkang Wang and Shaojun Dong
DOI: 10.1039/C2NR32623J

The RSC has teamed up with an Oxford University spin-out to sponsor six challenges on Marblar – a radical new online platform for finding applications for unused scientific discoveries.

More than 95% of technologies developed in universities never make it to market, leaving publicly or philanthropy-funded research collecting dust on the shelf.  Often, given that academic research can be so ahead of its time, the commercial relevance of these technologies isn’t immediately obvious.

Marblar aims to remove this bottleneck by crowdsourcing ideas for real-world applications from the global science and technology community, with the ultimate goal to create new products and new companies that will drive job creation around these innovative discoveries.

One of the projects to be selected is based on an article in Nanoscale: Take Two is an exciting new technique developed by Dr Sergio Bertazzo in Professor Molly Stevens’ lab at Imperial College London. It enables bioengineers to study interactions between cells and biomaterials by combining two forms of microscopy in an innovative way.

You can find more details on the Marblar website and read the Nanoscale article for free by following the link below:

Correlative light-ion microscopy for biological applications
Sergio Bertazzo, Thomas von Erlach, Silvia Goldoni, Pelin L Çandarlıoğlu and Molly M Stevens
DOI: 10.1039/C2NR30431G