Multifunctional carbon nanomaterials for diagnostic applications in infectious diseases and tumors

Infectious diseases (such as Corona Virus Disease 2019) and tumors pose a tremendous challenge to global public health. Early diagnosis of infectious diseases and tumors can lead to effective control and early intervention of the patient's condition. Over the past few decades, carbon nanomaterials (CNs) have attracted widespread attention in different scientific disciplines. In the field of biomedicine, carbon nanotubes, graphene, carbon quantum dots and fullerenes have the ability of improving the accuracy of the diagnosis by the improvement of the diagnostic approaches. Therefore, this review highlights their applications in the diagnosis of infectious diseases and tumors over the past five years. Recent advances in the field of biosensing, bioimaging, and nucleic acid amplification by such CNs are introduced and discussed, emphasizing the importance of their unique properties in infectious disease and tumor diagnosis and the challenges and opportunities that exist for future clinical applications. Although the application of CNs in the diagnosis of several diseases is still at a beginning stage, biosensors, bioimaging technologies and nucleic acid amplification technologies built on CNs represent a new generation of promising diagnostic tools that further support their potential application in infectious disease and tumor diagnosis.

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Carbon nanomaterials (CNs) are systematically introduced in this review.

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This review studies the application of CNs in infectious diseases and tumors diagnosis.

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CNs act as potent nanostructures for biosensing, bioimaging, & nucleic acid amplification.

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New CN-based detection methods were introduced to detect SARS-CoV-2.

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The challenges and prospects of CN-based diagnostic assays are also discussed.

A novel near-infrared fluorescent probe with an improved Stokes shift for specific detection of Hg2+ in mitochondria

The mercury ion (Hg2+), one of the most notorious heavy metal ions, not only causes environmental pollution, but also endangers human health. There is evidence that Hg2+ tends to accumulate in the mitochondria and to induce apoptosis. However, mitochondria-targeted near-infrared (NIR) fluorescent probes with large Stokes shifts are still scarcely described for the specific detection of Hg2+. In this work, a novel near-infrared fluorescent probe JRQNS with a large Stokes shift (78 nm) was reported, and applied for sensitive and specific detection of Hg2+ in mitochondria by incorporating an additional amine group with fused rings to rhodamine dyes to enhance the electron donating ability of amine groups. As expected, the probe exhibited high selectivity and sensitivity to Hg2+ with a detection limit as low as 1.5 nM and fast response times (3 min), revealing that JRQNS could be used as a practical probe for quantitative detection of Hg2+ in real-time. Importantly, JRQNS can be used as an efficient organelle-targeting probe for imaging Hg2+ in the mitochondria of living cells, and thus detect Hg2+ in real-time there. The application of the probe for its selective localization in mitochondria along with the nanomolar level of limit of detection to Hg2+ ions provided a potential tool for studying the cytotoxic mechanisms of Hg2+.

Multiple cation-doped linear polymers toward ATP sensing and a cell imaging application

A set of multiple cation-doped linear polymers (abbreviated as OPY-1,2-BE, OPY-1,4-BB, OPY-1,8-BO, OPY-1,4-OBB) synthesized from a dipyridine derivative (OPY) and dibrominated compounds were employed as fluorescent probes for adenosine triphosphate (ATP) sensing.