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L, Chen SJ, Xiao ZY: The optical Fulvestrant chemical structure properties of ZnO nanoparticles capped with polyvinyl butyral. J Sol–Gel . Sci Technol 2004, 30:157–161. 37. Nikesh VV, Mahamuni S: Highly photoluminescent ZnSe/ZnS quantum dots. Semiconductor Science Technology 2001, 16:687–690.CrossRef Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Authors’ contributions XHW, XYZ, and WZC synthesized the nanoparticles and measured the

microstructure. HQS, XL and XML measured, and analyzed the optical properties of the nanoparticles. This research work was carried out under the instruction of HLL and JHW. All authors contributed to discussing the results and writing the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final AZD5363 manuscript.”
“Background Quantum dots have been widely applied in the biomedical field due to their various advantages such as size-dependent optical properties, high fluorescence quantum yields, and excellent stability against photobleaching [1–3]. However, the biomedical applications of conventional semiconductor quantum dots which generally composed of the elements from the II-VI group or III-V group (e.g., Selleck Ponatinib CdSe) have been greatly limited by the release of heavy metals [1–5]. Recently, carbon luminescent

nanomaterials have incited great research interest because of their lower toxicity than semiconductor quantum dots and high photostability compared to organic dyes [6–9]. Graphene is a kind of two dimensional honeycomb structure composed by single layer of sp2 carbon atoms, which has been studied in various fields such as optoelectronic devices, energy storage media and drug delivery vectors [10–12]. Graphene quantum dots (GQDs), a kind of zero-dimensional material, have the same single-atom layer as graphene but their lateral dimensions are less than 100 nm [13–16]. Owing to their high surface area and good biocompatibility, GQDs have the potential to be vectors for delivery protein or drug molecules to cells [6, 12, 17–19]. GQDs can also serve as good fluorescent probes for bioimaging due to their excellent luminescent properties [6, 20, 21]. Beyond that, when functionalized with different chemical groups, GQDs can be used to build multifunctional structure through combining with various other materials such as protein, drug molecules, and nanotubes by covalent linkage, which will extend their widespread applications in biomedical field [18, 22, 23]. Jing and his colleagues have fabricated multifunctional core-shell structure capsules composed of olive oil, dual-layer porous TiO2 shell, Fe3O4, and GQDs [23].