Professor LI Lidong group's VIP research paper published in "Angewandte Chemie International Edition"

In recent years, Prof. Lidong Li and his group always devoted their efforts on the design and preparation of photoelectric materials and devices. By collaboration with Prof. Markus Antonietti (Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Germany), Prof. Li achieved important successes in the study of polymeric carbon nitride. This novel scientific result has been published by the famous international journal "Angewandte Chemie International Edition" (impact factor 11.709) (2016, 55, 3672-3676), the top international academic journal in the field of applied chemistry and materials. Considering its high importance and novelty, this work was selected by the issue as a "Very Important Paper" (VIP).

Polymeric carbon nitride has recently attracted significant interests as a novel semiconductor material due to its promising application in the fields of photocatalysis, electrocatalysis, biosensing and bioimaging. Prof. Li and coworkers prepared a novel type of quantum dot with a considerably large Stokes shift up to 200 nm and a high emission quantum yield of 48%, which is manufactured from graphitic carbon nitride material by “lining” the carbon nitride structure with phenyl groups through a supramolecular preorganization method. This method requires no chemical etching or hydrothermal treatments like other competing nanoparticle syntheses and is easy and safe. The nanoparticles of phenyl-modified carbon nitride exhibit a bright, tunable fluorescent color, and their remarkable performance in imaging is demonstrated by a simple incubation test of HeLa cells. We believe this work can open the door for the replacement of metal-based fluorescence nanomaterialsin many biomedicine related applications due to the simple and effective synthetic approach as well as the low cost of carbon nitride materials.

The study was financed by National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Education of China.