Toxicants in cigarette smoke adsorbed on red phosphorene nanosheet: A first-principles insight

Advanced Materials Design for Adsorption of Toxic Substances in Cigarette Smoke

Cigarettes, despite being economically important legal consumer products, are highly addictive and harmful, particularly to the respiratory system. Tobacco smoke is a complex mixture containing over 7000 chemical compounds, 86 of which are identified to have "sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity" in either animal or human tests. Thus, tobacco smoke poses a significant health risk to humans. This article focuses on materials that help reduce the levels of major carcinogens in cigarette smoke; these include nicotine, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, tobacco-specific nitrosamines, hydrogen cyanide, carbon monoxide, and formaldehyde. Specifically, the research progress on adsorption effects and mechanisms of advanced materials such as cellulose, zeolite, activated carbon, graphene, and molecularly imprinted polymers are highlighted. The future trends and prospects in this field are also discussed. Notably, with advancements in supramolecular chemistry and materials engineering, the design of functionally oriented materials has become increasingly multidisciplinary. Certainly, several advanced materials can play a critical role in reducing the harmful effects of cigarette smoke. This review aims to serve as an insightful reference for the design of hybrid and functionally oriented advanced materials.

Theoretical Insight on the Biosensing Applications of 2D Materials

The research on the design of efficient, reliable, and cost-effective biosensors is expanding given its high demand in various fields such as health care, environmental surveillance, agriculture, diagnostics, industries, and so forth. In the last decade, various fascinating and interesting 2D materials with extraordinary properties have been experimentally synthesized and theoretically predicted. 2D materials have been explored for the sensing of different biomolecules because of their large surface area and strong interaction with different biomolecules. Theoretical simulations can bring important insight on the interaction of biomolecules on 2D materials, charge transfer, orbital interactions, and so forth and may play an important role in the development of efficient biosensors. Quantum simulation techniques, such as density functional theory (DFT), are very powerful and are gaining popularity especially with the advent of high-speed computing facilities. This review article provides theoretical insight regarding the interaction of various biomolecules on different 2D materials and the charge transfer between the biomolecules and 2D materials leading to electrochemical signals, which can then provide experimentalists the useful design parameters for fabrication of biosensors. It also includes an overview of quantum simulations, use of the DFT method for simulating biomolecules on 2D materials, parameters obtained from theoretical simulations and sensitivity, and limitations of computational techniques for sensing biomolecules on 2D materials. Furthermore, this review summarizes the recent work in first-principles investigation of 2D materials for the purpose of biomolecule sensing. Beyond the traditional graphene or 2D transition-metal dichalcogenides, some novel and recently proposed 2D materials such as pentagraphene, haeckelite, MXenes, and so forth which have exhibited good sensing applications have also been highlighted.