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Nanotechnology has recently allowed us to design and prepare nanoplatforms with the potential to face currently unresolved problems. Among these platforms, nanoparticles in particular are versatile objects that find applications in many different areas. In the vast ensemble of materials that have been explored to obtain nanoparticles with improved performances, we here focus our attention on lanthanide-based nanocrystals. These recently developed species are extremely interesting and well known particularly for their ability to emit anti-Stokes shifted light (upconversion) with relatively high brightness. Many advantageous characteristics of such materials are emerging, and their use as multimodal imaging agents is rapidly growing. We here survey some recent examples on this subject, mainly focusing on systems having NIR-to-NIR emission properties for in vivo applications.

The quasi-equilibrium behaviour of isolated nuclear spin systems in full and reduced Liouville spaces is discussed. We focus in particular on the reduced Liouville spaces used in the low-order correlations in Liouville space (LCL) simulation method, a restricted-spin-space approach to efficiently modelling the dynamics of large networks of strongly coupled spins. General numerical methods for the calculation of quasi-equilibrium expectation values of observables in Liouville space are presented. In particular, we treat the cases of a time-independent Hamiltonian, a time-periodic Hamiltonian (with and without stroboscopic sampling) and powder averaging. These quasi-equilibrium calculation methods are applied to the example case of spin diffusion in solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance. We show that there are marked differences between the quasi-equilibrium behaviour of spin systems in the full and reduced spaces. These differences are particularly interesting in the time-periodic-Hamiltonian case, where simulations carried out in the reduced space demonstrate ergodic behaviour even for small spins systems (as few as five homonuclei). The implications of this ergodic property on the success of the LCL method in modelling the dynamics of spin diffusion in magic-angle spinning experiments of powders is discussed. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4726162]

We introduce a new approach to improve structural and dynamical determination of large metalloproteins using solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) with 1 H detection under ultrafast magic angle spinning (MAS). The approach is based on the rapid and sensitive acquisition of an extensive set of 15 N and 13 C nuclear relaxation rates. The system on which we demonstrate these methods is the enzyme Cu, Zn superoxide dismutase (SOD), which coordinates a Cu ion available either in Cu + (diamagnetic) or Cu 2+ (paramagnetic) form. Paramagnetic relaxation enhancements are obtained from the difference in rates measured in the two forms and are employed as structural constraints for the determination of the protein structure. When added to 1 H- 1 H distance restraints, they are shown to yield a twofold improvement of the precision of the structure. Site-specific order parameters and timescales of motion are obtained by a Gaussian axial fluctuation (GAF) analysis of the relaxation rates of the diamagnetic molecule, and interpreted in relation to backbone structure and metal binding. Timescales for motion are found to be in the range of the overall correlation time in solution, where internal motions characterized here would not be observable.