Articles in 2021

Steam disinfection of silicone-rubber baby teats can lead to steam etching and chemical modification of the teat surface. This can release micro- and nanoplastics and result in ingestion. The results suggested that by the age of one year, a baby could ingest more than 600,000 microplastics.

While chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell-based therapy has been approved for clinical use for certain types of blood cancers, it remains difficult to achieve precise spatiotemporal control of the elicited anti-tumour response. Here, the authors propose light-switchable CAR T cells that can be remotely activated by a nano-optogenetic approach, reducing unwanted side effects.

Trivalent arsenic (As^III) is a clinically approved treatment agent for patients with promyelocytic leukaemia, but cannot be used for other types of leukaemia due to its toxicity. Here the authors show that different patient-derived leukaemia cells express CD71 and design a ferritin-based nanoparticle for specific delivery of As^III to these cells, demonstrating substantially improved efficacy towards different leukaemia types in animal models, with reduced side effects.

Torsion-strained Ta_xTm_yIr_1−x−yO_2−δ nanocatalyst with abundant grain boundaries is promising towards acidic oxygen evolution in practical proton exchange membrane electrolysers. The cost of H₂ is estimated to be reduced to US$1 per kg.

Engineering the energy dispersion of polaritons in microcavities can yield intriguing effects such as the anomalous quantum Hall and Rashba effects. Now, different Berry curvature distributions of polariton bands are obtained in a strongly coupled organic–inorganic two-dimensional perovskite single-crystal microcavity and can be modified via temperature and magnetic field variation.

Nanoparticle-mediated photoporation is used to temporarily permeabilize cell membranes for intracellular delivery of macromolecules, but cell exposure to nanoparticles might cause cellular damage and hamper application of the technique to therapeutic cell engineering. Here the authors show that, under photothermal heating, nanofibre-embedded iron oxide nanoparticles can be used to deliver effector macromolecules to different types of cells, in a contactless manner, with no cellular toxicity or diminished therapeutic potency.

DNA nanoswitch calipers can measure distances within single molecules with atomic resolution. Applied to single-molecule proteomics, they can enable the identification and quantification of molecules in trace samples via mechanical fingerprinting.

The effective absorption spectrum of metal-bound molecules and a rich plasmon-driven chemistry landscape are constructed by monitoring the interfacial environment of a thousand single nanocavities with slightly varied resonance energies.

High optical-quality-factor, non-local metasurfaces enable independent functions across different wavelength bands.

The stimulation of interferon genes (STING) pathway with STING agonists such as cyclic dinucleotides (CDNs) has emerged as a promising immunotherapeutic approach. Here, the authors show that Mn²⁺ can amplify the STING-promoted anti-tumour immune response in challenging murine tumour models by coordinating with CDNs and self-assembling into nanoparticles that can be delivered locally and systemically.

Type I interferons (IFNs) have strong antitumour activity yet their clinical use is limited by their off-target toxicity and by their effect on immune evasion. Here the authors design a biomimetic nanoparticle loaded with an IFN inducer, which can at the same time replenish intratumoural IFNs and reduce their immunosuppressive activity, showing therapeutic efficacy in several animal tumour models.

Gas vesicles are air-filled protein nanostructures naturally expressed by certain bacteria and archaea to achieve cellular buoyancy. Here the authors show that, under the stimulation of pulsed ultrasound, targeted gas vesicles and gas vesicles expressed in genetically modified bacteria and mammalian cells release nanobubbles that, collapsing, lead to controlled mechanical damage of the surrounding biological milieu, demonstrating that, under focused ultrasound actuation, gas vesicles have potential applications as therapeutic agents.

Moiré-trapped interlayer excitons in a transition metal dichalcogenide heterobilayer serve as a sensitive optical probe of carrier filling in their immediate environment to characterize the doping of the moiré superlattice.

Tumours that grow on organ surfaces are difficult to eradicate as the complex topology of underlying tissues might hamper accessibility to tumour foci even after surgery. In this paper the authors engineer a peptide-based hydrogel that can be applied on surface tumours before or after resection, conform to the tissue underneath and release therapeutics.

Alloying copper with isolated heteroatoms enables the C protonation of CO₂ to HCOO* on activated copper sites, resulting in exclusive electrochemical CO₂-to-HCOOH conversion with considerably high activity.

Low-temperature ultraclean integration of large-area MoS₂ thin-film transistors with nitride micro-LEDs through a back end of line process enables the demonstration of displays with high resolution and uniformity.

Small semiconductor nanocrystals control the assembly of larger plasmonic nanostructures through interfacial self-limiting aggregation, leading to permeable and colloidally stable photoactive hybrids for photocatalysis and tracking of light-induced electron transfer.

Although conventional analytical techniques can measure ensemble averages, single-molecule junctions can sense molecular reaction processes at the single-event level. The integration of a single-molecule Pd catalyst into a gapped graphene junction enables the electrical detection of a full catalytic cycle of the Suzuki–Miyaura coupling and clarifies the controversial transmetallation mechanism.

A trap, formed by a DNA-origami sphere docked onto a solid-state nanopore, allows the hydrodynamic trapping and label-free observation of single proteins, enabling nucleotide-dependent protein conformation to be discriminated on the timescale of submilliseconds to hours.

Twisted photonic graphene superlattices enable the realization of high-performance room-temperature magic-angle lasers.