Microfluidic Assisted Flash Precipitation of Photocrosslinkable Fluorescent Organic Nanoparticles for Fine Size Tuning and Enhanced Photoinduced Processes

Fluorescent Multifunctional Organic Nanoparticles for Drug Delivery and Bioimaging: A Tutorial Review

Fluorescent organic nanoparticles (FONs) are a large family of nanostructures constituted by organic components that emit light in different spectral regions upon excitation, due to the presence of organic fluorophores. FONs are of great interest for numerous biological and medical applications, due to their high tunability in terms of composition, morphology, surface functionalization, and optical properties. Multifunctional FONs combine several functionalities in a single nanostructure (emission of light, carriers for drug-delivery, functionalization with targeting ligands, etc.), opening the possibility of using the same nanoparticle for diagnosis and therapy. The preparation, characterization, and application of these multifunctional FONs require a multidisciplinary approach. In this review, we present FONs following a tutorial approach, with the aim of providing a general overview of the different aspects of the design, preparation, and characterization of FONs. The review encompasses the most common FONs developed to date, the description of the most important features of fluorophores that determine the optical properties of FONs, an overview of the preparation methods and of the optical characterization techniques, and the description of the theoretical approaches that are currently adopted for modeling FONs. The last part of the review is devoted to a non-exhaustive selection of some recent biomedical applications of FONs.

Microfluidic Nanoparticles for Drug Delivery

Nanoparticles (NPs) have attracted tremendous interest in drug delivery in the past decades. Microfluidics offers a promising strategy for making NPs for drug delivery due to its capability in precisely controlling NP properties. The recent success of mRNA vaccines using microfluidics represents a big milestone for microfluidic NPs for pharmaceutical applications, and its rapid scaling up demonstrates the feasibility of using microfluidics for industrial-scale manufacturing. This article provides a critical review of recent progress in microfluidic NPs for drug delivery. First, the synthesis of organic NPs using microfluidics focusing on typical microfluidic methods and their applications in making popular and clinically relevant NPs, such as liposomes, lipid NPs, and polymer NPs, as well as their synthesis mechanisms are summarized. Then, the microfluidic synthesis of several representative inorganic NPs (e.g., silica, metal, metal oxide, and quantum dots), and hybrid NPs is discussed. Lastly, the applications of microfluidic NPs for various drug delivery applications are presented.

A fluorescent organic nanoparticles-based sensor synthesized through hydrothermal process and its application in sensing Hg2+ of real samples and fast visual detection

The fluorescent organic nanoparticles (FONs)-based sensor has been attracting great attention in recent years. There are still big challenges in the preparation and application of FONs-based sensor. In this study, a FONs-based sensor was designed and developed through facile hydrothermal process using 3-perylenecarboxaldehyde (PlCA) as the fluorophore and L-methionine (Met) as the recognition site for mercury ions. According to the experimental results, the fluorescence intensity of the as-prepared PlCA-M would decrease when adding Hg²⁺ and the mechanism was extrapolated to be photoinduced electron transfer inducing by specific coordination interaction. The acquired PlCA-M-based sensor was used to monitor Hg²⁺ in several real samples (environmental water, tea, and apple) with the limit of detection being 60 nM. Remarkably, a visual detection device based on FONs, SDS-PAAG (sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel) @PlCA-M was firstly constructed and successfully used to Hg²⁺ semi-quantitation by naked eyes. In addition, the acquired FONs was applied into imaging tool for security information detection and identified as solid-state luminescent material for the first time.