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Novel boron nitride (BN) ultrathin fibrous networks are firstly synthesized via an one-step solvothermal process. The average diameter of BN nanofibers is only ~8 nm. This nanonets exhibit excellent performance for water treatment. The maximum adsorption capacity for methyl blue is 327.8 mg g(-1). Especially, they present the property of ultrafast adsorption for dye removal. Only ~1 min is enough to almost achieve the adsorption equilibrium. In addition, the BN fibrous nanonets could be applied for the size-selective separation of nanoparticles via a filtration process.

Single-cell phenotypic profiling of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in the blood of cancer patients can reveal vital tumor biology information. Even though various approaches have been provided to enrich and detect CTCs, it remains challenging for consecutive CTC sorting, enumeration, and single-cell characterizations. Here, we report an integrated microfluidic device (IMD) for single-cell phenotypic profiling of CTCs that enables automated CTCs sorting from whole blood following continuous single-cell phenotypic analysis while satisfying the requirements of both high purity (92 ± 3%) of cell sorting and high-throughput processing capacity (5 mL whole blood/3 h). Using this new technique we test the phenotypes of individual CTCs collected from xenograft tumor-bearing mice and colorectal (CRC) patients at different tumor stages. We obtained a correlation between CTC characterization and clinical tumor stage and treatment response. The developed IMD offers a high-throughput, convenient, and rapid strategy to study individual CTCs toward minimally invasive cancer therapy prediction and disease monitoring and has the potential to be translated to clinic for liquid biopsy.

Intracellular trace Zn and Cu play important roles in the regulation of cell function. Considering the limitations of existing metal ion detection methods regarding sensitivity and applicability to living cells, an amplification strategy based on functional DNA self-assembly under DNAzyme catalysis to improve the sensitivity of intracellular Zn and Cu imaging is reported. In this process, metal ions as cofactor can activate the catalysis of DNAzyme to shear substrate chains, and each broken substrate chain can initiate consecutive hybridizations of hairpin probes (Hx) labeled with fluorophore, which can reflect the information on a single metal ion with multiple fluorophores. The detection limit can reach nearly 80 pM and high-sensitivity fluorescence imaging of intracellular Zn and Cu can be achieved. The results are important for research on cell function regulation associated with trace Zn and Cu. This approach is also a new way to improve the sensitivity of other trace metal ion imaging.

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