Jinping Wang

Carbon dots: surface engineering and applications

Carbon dots have attracted a great deal of attention because of their high performance, cheap and facile preparation, and potential applications in a wide area. In order to broaden their applications, especially to meet specific requirements, surface engineering, including tailoring surface functional group coating and subsequent chemical modification as required, is an effective strategy for further functionalization of carbon dots. In this article, representative approaches to coating the surface with various functional groups, and strategies for conjugating specific materials onto the surface of carbon dots for functional modification via covalent bonds, electrostatic interactions and hydrogen bonds are highlighted, as well as the results from explorations of their various applications in target modulated sensing, accurate drug delivery and bioimaging at high resolution.

Syntheses of new rare earth complexes with carboxymethylated polysaccharides and evaluation of their in vitro antifungal activities.

In the present paper, La, Eu and Yb were selected to represent light, middle and heavy rare earths to form complexes with polysaccharides through chelating coordination of carboxyl groups, which were added into polysaccharide chains by means of carboxymethylation. Their antifungal activities against plant pathogenic fungi were evaluated using growth rate method. These rare earth complexes exhibited various antifungal activities against the tested fungi, depending on rare earth elements, polysaccharide types and fungal species. Among these three metal elements (i.e. La, Eu and Yb), Yb formed the complexes with the most effective antifungal properties. Furthermore, the results showed that ligands of carboxymethylated polysaccharides played a key role in promoting cytotoxicity of the rare earth complexes. Carboxymethylated Ganoderma applanatum polysaccharide (CGAP) was found to be the most effective ligand to form complexes with antifungal activities, followed by carboxymethylated lentinan (CLNT) and carboxymethylated Momordica charantia polysaccharide (CMCP).

Carboxylate groups play a major role in antitumor activity of Ganoderma applanatum polysaccharide.

In this paper, the structure difference between the polysaccharides isolated from fruit bodies (FGAP) and submerged fermentation system (SGAP) of Ganoderma applanatum was investigated by means of GPC, HPLC and IR, respectively. And their antitumor activities were evaluated against Sarcoma 180 in vivo. The results showed that FGAP and SGAP were typical polysaccharides with different molecular weights, monosaccharide components, and functional groups. Closely related to the distinct structures, FGAP exhibited a better antitumor activity than SGAP. Moreover, since FGAP contained carboxylate groups rather than SGAP, such groups were chemically introduced into SGAP (CSGAP) by carboxymethylation in order to identify their contribution to antitumor activity. The results demonstrated that the inhibition of CSGAP against Sarcoma 180 in vivo was significantly enhanced by comparison to the native SGAP and even higher than that of FGAP, suggesting that the carboxylate groups played a major role in antitumor activity of G. applanatum polysaccharide.

Highly crystalline carbon dots from fresh tomato: UV emission and quantum confinement

In this article, fresh tomatoes are explored as a low-cost source to prepare high-performance carbon dots by using microwave-assisted pyrolysis. Given that amino groups might act as nucleophiles for cleaving covalent bridging ester or ether in the crosslinked macromolecules in the biomass bulk, ethylenediamine (EDA) and urea with amino groups were applied as nucleophiles to modulate the chemical composites of the carbon nanoparticles in order to tune their fluorescence emission and enhance their quantum yields. Very interestingly, the carbon dots synthesized in the presence of urea had a highly crystalline nature, a low-degree amorphous surface and were smaller than 5 nm. Moreover, the doped N contributed to the formation of a cyclic form of core that resulted in a strong electron-withdrawing ability within the conjugated C plane. Therefore, this type of carbon dot exhibited marked quantum confinement, with the maximum fluorescence peak located in the UV region. Carbon nanoparticles greater than 20 nm in size, prepared using pristine fresh tomato and in the presence of EDA, emitted surface state controlled fluorescence. Additionally, carbon nanoparticles synthesized using fresh tomato pulp in the presence of EDA and urea were explored for bioimaging of plant pathogenic fungi and the detection of vanillin.