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We have developed an innovative pathological biopsy strategy by expanding the differences of ROS levels among cancer cells, inflammatory cells and normal cells using cross-linked lipoic acid vesicles loaded with vitamin C (VC@cLAVs), combined with chemiluminescence imaging technology. By analyzing the different trends of intracellular chemiluminescence intensity, the three types of cells were quickly and accurately differentiated from diseased tissues, thus holding clinical tumor diagnostic potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electrolysis of water is currently the most promising method for hydrogen production. Developing low-cost, highly active, and stable electrocatalysts is crucial for advancing large-scale industrial electrolysis of water for hydrogen production. Fe-CoMoP/NF electrocatalysts were fabricated on nickel foam (NF) by a simple cation exchange method. Benefiting from the synergistic effect of multiple metals and the ordered distribution of multi-level nanosheets, Fe-CoMoP/NF demonstrates outstanding bifunctional electrocatalytic performance for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in 1 M KOH solution, with overpotentials of 205 mV and 94 mV at 10 mA cm−2, respectively. Moreover, the electrolytic cell assembled with this catalyst as the cathode and anode can achieve a current density of 10 mA cm−2 with a cell voltage of only 1.55 V and can operate stably for more than 115 h. The excellent performance of Fe-CoMoP/NF is attributed to the inherent HER activity and high conductivity of phosphide, as well as the slow introduction of Fe ions, which can regulate the charge density around Co and Mo, thus maintaining the integrity of the nanostructured Fe-CoMoP/NF and exposing a larger active surface area. This work offers an effective strategy for preparing high-efficiency, low-cost integrated water splitting reaction electrodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chemical structures or positive charge-guided specific cell organelles' staining was an interesting but very challenging research work. In this paper, we synthesized a series of triphenylamine (TPA) derivatives with mono-, di- and tri-pyridinium as substituent groups. By exchanging the negative ions (I−, BF4− and PF6−) between them, a platform containing small compounds was established. After that, mammalian cells of HeLa and plant cells of BY-2 were employed for the study on cell imaging. The results clearly demonstrated that mono-pyridinium derivatives (TPA-Py-I−, TPA-Py-BF4− and TPA-Py-PF6−) are mitochondrion-targeted (for HeLa cells) and cell wall-targeted (for BY-2 cells). However, both di- and tri-pyridinium substituted derivatives (TPA-diPy-BF4− and TPA-triPy-BF4−) were nucleus-targeted for both cell lines. From these important findings, we can conclude that the quantity of positive charge plays a decisive role in different cell organelle-targeted staining. We also declared that our research results were very useful for designing and synthesizing probes with good cellular uptake capability, significantly enhanced targeting ability, and DNA detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fluorescent probes are powerful tools for investigating reactive oxygen species (ROS) in living organisms. The overproduced “primary” ROS of superoxide anions (O2Ṗ−) cause a chain of oxidative damage. In order to monitor O2Ṗ− level fluctuations in living cells, we synthesized two reaction-type probes of TPA-DHP-1,2,3 and TPA-PPA-1,2,3, which were composed of an electron-rich triphenylamine (TPA) and the very active functional groups of dihydropyridine (DHP) and pyridinium (PPA). Intriguingly, DHP and PPA were able to carry out easy proton abstractions and nucleophilic reactions in the presence of O2Ṗ−, resulting in the corresponding products with sharp wavelength shifts, and elevated fluorescence intensities. Therefore, undesirable background fluorescence interference can be reduced during the monitoring and imaging process. Meanwhile, the developed dual-channel monitoring strategy not only provides observations of the O2Ṗ− level fluctuations, but could also be employed to image the dynamic accumulation process of probes in the different cell organelles. Therefore, the design could provide a simple, accurate and universal platform for biological applications in future research work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]