Liang Qiu,Haoran Zhang,Bo Wang,Yong Zhan,Chengfen Xing,Cai-Yuan Pan
CO2-responsive polymeric nano-objects with assembly-related aggregation-induced emission (AIE) are obtained via polymerization-induced self-assembly (PISA) of 2-(dimethylamino)ethyl methacrylate (DMAEMA), 2-(4-formylphenoxy)ethyl methacrylate (MAEBA), and 4-(1,2,2-triphenylvinyl)phenyl methacrylate (TPEMA). These nano-objects exhibit, depending on the feed of MAEBA, a morphology evolution process from spherical micelles to vesicles. Due to the presence of DMAEMA units, CO2 promotes morphology transformation of the nano-objects from spheres to a mixture of “jellyfish” and vesicles and vesicles to complex vesicles. Moreover, TPEMA endows the AIE feature to these nano-objects, offering a strategy to monitor the morphology evolution process in real time. Thus, this approach is significant for exploring the assembly mechanism of copolymer in polymerization-induced self-assembly and designing multistimuli-responsive polymeric nanomaterials with tunable morphologies and sizes.
Yi Xing,Mengyun Zhou,Xiangmei Liu,Minghang Qiao,Liping Zhou,Tailin Xu,Xueji Zhang,Xin Du
Chemodynamic therapy (CDT), which catalyzes the production of highly toxic reactive oxygen species (ROS), has been widely used in tumor therapy in the past five years. However, most of the current nanomaterials for CDT are difficult to penetrate into the tumor effectively due to the lack of motility, resulting in an unsatisfactory CDT effect. Herein, bioinspired jellyfish-like carbon/manganese nanomotors (JCMNs) are designed to achieve hydrogen peroxide (H 2 O 2 ) and NIR light dual-propulsion for the enhanced CDT therapy. Based on the jellyfish-like asymmetric structure, the manganese component can catalyze H 2 O 2 to generate chemical concentration gradient, propelling JCMNs to dynamically generate ROS in cells by self-diffusiophoresis. In addition, the carbon component of JCMNs can absorb near-infrared (NIR) light to produce a temperature gradient, driving JCMNs to enhance tumor penetration by self-thermophoresis. The combination of chemical and NIR light propulsions significantly improves the efficiency of tumor CDT, revealing that it should be a reasonable strategy to promote the development of nanobiomedicine by endowing nanosystems with propulsion capacity.
Nonspherical particles have attracted increasing interest because of their shape anisotropy. However, the current methods to prepare anisotropic particles suffer from complex generation processes and limited shape diversity. Here, we develop a piezoelectric microfluidic system to generate complex flow configurations and fabricate jellyfish-like microparticles. In this delicate system, the piezoelectric vibration could evolve a jellyfish-like flow configuration in the microchannel and the in situ photopolymerization could instantly capture the flow architecture. The sizes and morphologies of the particles are precisely controlled by tuning the piezoelectric and microfluidic parameters. Furthermore, multi-compartmental microparticles with a dual-layer structure are achieved by modifying the injecting channel geometry. Moreover, such unique a shape endows the particles with flexible motion ability especially when stimuli-responsive materials are incorporated. On the basis of that, we demonstrate the capability of the jellyfish-like microparticles in highly efficient adsorption of organic pollutants under external control. Thus, it is believed that such jellyfish-like microparticles are highly versatile in potential applications and the piezoelectric-integrated microfluidic strategy could open an avenue for the creation of such anisotropic particles.