A brief review of CDots from the perspective of traditional QDs clarifies the basic concepts, unique characteristics and challenges.

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Hypoxic microenvironment severely reduces therapeutic efficacy of oxygendependent photodynamic therapy in solid tumor due to the hampered cytotoxic oxygen radicals generation. Herein, a biocompatible nanoparticle (NP) is developed by combining bovine serum albumin, indocyanine green (ICG), and an oxygen-independent radicals generator (AIPH) for efficient sequential cancer therapy, denoted as BIA NPs. Upon near-infrared irradiation, the photothermal effect generated by ICG will induce rapid decomposition of AIPH to release cytotoxic alkyl radicals, leading to cancer cell death in both normoxic and hypoxic environments. Moreover, such nanosystem provides the highest AIPH loading capacity (14.9%) among all previously reported radical nanogenerators (generally from 5-8%). Additionally, the aggregation-quenched fluorescence of ICG molecules in the NPs can be gradually released and recovered upon irradiation enabling real-time drug release monitoring. More attractively, these BIA NPs exhibit remarkable anticancer effects both in vitro and in vivo, achieving 100% tumor elimination and 100% survival rate among 50 days treatment. These results highlight that this albumin-based nanoplatform is promising for high-performance cancer therapy circumventing hypoxic tumor environment and possessing great potential for future clinical translation.

A heteroatom-rich 3D noninterpenetrating metal-organic framework (MOF) Cd-EDDA constructed from an ethylene glycol ether bridging tetracarboxylate ligand H4 EDDA (5,5'-(ethane-1,2-diylbis(oxy))diisophthalic acid) shows good chemical resistance to both acidic and alkaline solutions with a pH ranging from 2.0 to 12.2. There is a corresponding ratiometric luminescence response to pH from 2.0 to 11.5, and the sensing mechanism is also discussed through ion chromatography and molecular force field-based calculations. Importantly, the probe can easily be regenerated simply by modulating the pH of the solution, thus being the first example of a regenerable MOF-based ratiometric luminescent probe for pH.

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Two polymers were used with no additives to directly construct multifunctional carbon dots by a microwave-assisted method for simultaneous gene delivery and cell imaging.

Carbon dots (CDs) are photoluminescent nanoparticles with distinctive properties, having great potential in nano-biomaterial systems such as gene/drug delivery vectors and cell imaging agents.

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