Highly sensitive glutathione assay and intracellular imaging with functionalized semiconductor quantum dots

Abstract

A fluorescent nanoprobe based on semiconductor quantum dots is designed for real-time glutathione imaging in living cells.

Recent development of nanomedicine for the treatment of bacterial biofilm infections

“…Besides, many other nanozymes with different components and multiple functions have also been designed and studied for combating bacterial biofilms. Liu et al demonstrated that MOF/Ce‐based nanoagents with dual enzyme‐like properties can both disrupt biofilms and kill the bacteria inside 23 . The cerium (IV) complexes with DNase mimic activity can hydrolyze eDNA and disrupt the established biofilms, while the MOF with peroxidase‐like activity can kill bacteria with the combination of H 2 O 2 .…”

“…The biological, chemical, and physical underpinning of the biofilm formation is complicated, which has posed great challenges during the development of effective antibiofilm strategy 1,14,15 . Along with the advances in the understanding of the biofilms, more potential therapeutic targets have been realized for the prevention and control of bacterial biofilms 23,81,105 . On the other hand, nanomaterials have great flexibility in controlling the composition, morphology, surface, and size, which makes them versatile platforms to integrate with other functional components.…”

“…First, nanomaterials can encapsulate, deliver, and release the antimicrobial agents to the biofilms, which can significantly improve their accumulation in biofilms, increase their local concentration, and decrease their systematic toxicity. Second, the rich physical and chemical properties of nanomaterials have provided great opportunity for the development of novel therapeutic approaches with completely different mechanisms to combat bacterial biofilms compared with antibiotics 23,81,120 . For example, liposomes containing antibiotics can deliver drugs to biofilms and enhance their therapeutic efficacy; Au nanostructures can transform the light energy into localized hyperthermia for the physical killing of bacteria; photo‐active nanomaterials can generate bactericidal ROS under light irradiation; nanozymes could catalytically inactivate bacteria by ROS.…”

“…In view of this, nanomaterial‐based antibiofilm strategy has received great attention over the past decade. Typically, drug delivery nanocarriers have been designed to control the release of antimicrobials into the biofilm‐infected tissues to enhance the availability and decrease the adverse side‐effects of antibiotics 23 . Besides, photothermal nanoagents could locally generate heat under light irradiation and thermally ablate bacteria for photothermal therapy (PTT) of biofilm infections 24–26 .…”

Two-dimensional nanomaterials for Förster resonance energy transfer–based sensing applications

“…As discussed above, most TMD-based FRET sensors exploit the differential affinity of TMDs toward probes and the probe-target combination. Unlike other TMDs, the MnO 2 nanosheets are chemically active and could be reduced into Mn 2+ , which makes them good candidates in constructing novel FRET sensors for the detection of reductants, especially GSH, the most abundant thiolated tripeptide in living cells [38,[121][122][123][124][125][126][127][128][129][130][131][132][133][134][135][136]. The first study was carried out by Deng et al [38].…”