A soft hydrogel based self-healing triboelectric nanogenerator (HS-TENG) is highly deformable, and both mechanically and electrically self-healable upon exposure to water spraying and near-infrared (NIR) light.

Hierarchical self-assembly of synthetic polypeptides has attracted increasing interests due to its protein-mimetic structure and great potential in nanotechnology and biomedical applications. However, controlling the morphology and function of polymeric nanostructures via secondary structures remains largely unexplored. Here, we report an unusual micelle-to-vesicle transformation of cholesterol-decorated poly(l-cysteine) copolymer assemblies in response to reactive oxygen species (ROS). We found that the interesting morphological transition correlates with the alteration in conformations from β-sheet to α-helix, which grants an attractive "on-off" switch for triggered release and cellular interaction. We further demonstrated the usefulness of the conformation-regulated assembly strategy both in vitro and in vivo, taking cancer treatment as a model. The work offers a new insight on the folding and hierarchical assembly of polypeptides and a novel approach for the development of smart platforms in biosensing, disease treatment, and diagnostic applications.

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To address the requirements of biomedical applications including biosensing, bioimaging, and drug delivery, fluorescent nanomaterials served as efficient tools in many cases. Among them, near-infrared quantum dots (NIR QDs) have been used as novel fluorescent labels for their binary advantages of both QDs and NIR light. In this review, through collecting references in recent 10 years, we have introduced basic structures and properties of NIR QDs and summarized the classification and the related synthetic methods. This review also highlights the functionalization and surface bioconjugation of NIR QDs, and their biomedical applications in biosensing, bioimaging, and drug delivery. This article is categorized under: Diagnostic Tools > Diagnostic Nanodevices Diagnostic Tools > In Vitro Nanoparticle-Based Sensing Diagnostic Tools > In Vivo Nanodiagnostics and Imaging.