This version is available at https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/47172/ Strathprints is designed to allow users to access the research output of the University of Strathclyde. Unless otherwise explicitly stated on the manuscript, Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Please check the manuscript for details of any other licences that may have been applied. You may not engage in further distribution of the material for any profitmaking activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute both the url (https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/) and the content of this paper for research or private study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge.Any correspondence concerning this service should be sent to the Properties of the nematic-isotropic phase transition in polymer and low molecular weight liquid crystals doped with nanoparticles have been studied both experimentally and theoretically in terms of molecular mean-field theory. The variation of the transition temperature and the transition heat with the increasing volume fraction of CdSe quantum dot nanoparticles in copolymer and low molecular weight nematics has been investigated experimentally and the data are interpreted using the results of the molecular theory which accounts for a possibility of phase separation when the system undergoes the nematic-isotropic transition. The theory predicts that the nematic and isotropic phases with different concentrations of nanoparticles may coexist over a broad temperature range, but only if the nanoparticle volume fraction exceeds a certain threshold value which depends on the material parameters. Such unusual phase separation effects are determined by the strong interaction between nanoparticles and mesogenic groups and between nanoparticles themselves.