Battery-type hollow Prussian blue analogues for asymmetric supercapacitor

Hollow/porous nanomaterials are widely applicable in various fields. The last years have witnessed increasing interests in the nanoscale Kirkendall effect as a versatile route to fabricate hollow/porous nanostructures. The transformation...

Molecular simulation of energy storage properties of R32, R134A and R1234YF in MOF-5 AND MOF-177

The addition of porous nanomaterials is promising to enhance the thermal energy property of the organic working fluid. In this paper, molecular dynamics (MD) and grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations are employed to investigate the adsorption and energy storage properties of R32, R134a and R1234yf in MOF-5 and MOF-177. The results showed that the working fluid with small molecular size is easier to absorb and desorb in MOF structure. Besides, the MOF with larger specific surface area and pore size can absorb more organic working fluids, which can result in the larger enhancement of energy storage.

Porous Nanomaterials Targeting Autophagy in Bone Regeneration

Porous nanomaterials (PNMs) are nanosized materials with specially designed porous structures that have been widely used in the bone tissue engineering field due to the fact of their excellent physical and chemical properties such as high porosity, high specific surface area, and ideal biodegradability. Currently, PNMs are mainly used in the following four aspects: (1) as an excellent cargo to deliver bone regenerative growth factors/drugs; (2) as a fluorescent material to trace cell differentiation and bone formation; (3) as a raw material to synthesize or modify tissue engineering scaffolds; (4) as a bio-active substance to regulate cell behavior. Recent advances in the interaction between nanomaterials and cells have revealed that autophagy, a cellular survival mechanism that regulates intracellular activity by degrading/recycling intracellular metabolites, providing energy/nutrients, clearing protein aggregates, destroying organelles, and destroying intracellular pathogens, is associated with the phagocytosis and clearance of nanomaterials as well as material-induced cell differentiation and stress. Autophagy regulates bone remodeling balance via directly participating in the differentiation of osteoclasts and osteoblasts. Moreover, autophagy can regulate bone regeneration by modulating immune cell response, thereby modulating the osteogenic microenvironment. Therefore, autophagy may serve as an effective target for nanomaterials to facilitate the bone regeneration process. Increasingly, studies have shown that PNMs can modulate autophagy to regulate bone regeneration in recent years. This paper summarizes the current advances on the main application of PNMs in bone regeneration, the critical role of autophagy in bone regeneration, and the mechanism of PNMs regulating bone regeneration by targeting autophagy.

Comparison of SEM-Assisted Nanoporometric and Microporometric Morphometric Techniques Applied for the Ultramicroporous Polymer Films

One of the most important applications of polymeric porous nanomaterials is the design of nanoporous structures for operation in patch-clamp systems allowing to establish a gigaohm contact, as well as for the measurements of biomolecules, informational macromolecules, including DNA, translocating through the nanopore arrays. Development of nanopore sequencing techniques leads to fundamentally new big data arrays, but their representativeness and validity, as well as the validity of counting of biomacromolecular particles based on ultramicropore arrays, strongly depends both on the pore size (in engineering lithography unimodal pore size distribution is optimal) and the accuracy of the size distribution measurements using instrumental methods. However, the former is unattainable when using soft matter or stretchable, plastic and elastic polymer materials and films, while the latter depends on the metrological parameters of the instrumental and algorithmic porosimetry techniques. Therefore in this paper the question about the applicability of polymer materials with pore arrays for the studies of biomacromolecules and bionanostructures is proposed to be answered using a comparative analysis of two different porosimetry approaches with the resolution not lower than electron microscopic one.

Metal-Organic Frameworks-Based Nanomaterials for Drug Delivery

The composition and topology of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are exceptionally tailorable; moreover, they are extremely porous and represent an excellent Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) surface area (≈3000–6000 m2·g−1). Nanoscale MOFs (NMOFs), as cargo nanocarriers, have increasingly attracted the attention of scientists and biotechnologists during the past decade, in parallel with the evolution in the use of porous nanomaterials in biomedicine. Compared to other nanoparticle-based delivery systems, such as porous nanosilica, nanomicelles, and dendrimer-encapsulated nanoparticles, NMOFs are more flexible, have a higher biodegradability potential, and can be more easily functionalized to meet the required level of host–guest interactions, while preserving a larger and fully adjustable pore window in most cases. Due to these unique properties, NMOFs have the potential to carry anticancer cargos. In contrast to almost all porous materials, MOFs can be synthesized in diverse morphologies, including spherical, ellipsoidal, cubic, hexagonal, and octahedral, which facilitates the acceptance of various drugs and genes.

Impact of porous nanomaterials on inhibiting protein aggregation behaviour

Aggregation of intrinsically disordered as well as the ordered proteins under certain premises or physiological conditions leads to pathological disorder.

A Facile Strategy for Synthesis of Porous Cu2O Nanosphere and Application as Nanozymes in Colorimetric Biosensing

Due to the unique advantage, developing a rapid, simple and economical synthetic strategy for porous nanomaterials is of great interest. In this work, for the first time, using sodium hypochlorite...