Chemical crosslinking technology was rapidly developed and utilized to prepare structurally fixed, stabilized and functionalized polymer nanoassemblies and nanoarchitectures by covalently reinforcing the interactions between the polymer chains. This perspective reviewed recent advances on the crosslinked polymer nanoassemblies and their applications, mainly in drug delivery. Moreover, possible future research outlooks in the field of Shell-crosslinked polymer nanoassemblies were also stated and discussed.

Lindera glauca (Sieb. et Zucc.) Bl is Chinese herbal medicine known as Niujin tree or Leigongzi. Alkaloids, flavonoids, terpenes, volatile oils, etc., are found in L. glauca, exhibiting some pharmacological activities such as anti-bacterial, anti-influenza virus, anti-fungal, antioxidant activities, an effect on bronchial and intestinal smooth muscle, and so on. Herein, we summarized chemical compositions and physiological activities of L. glauca for future research.

Nanomaterials are attracting renewed interest due to their novel properties, which are not seen in their conventional micro state counterparts. They are used in advanced applications in the fields of catalysis, medicine, electronics, optics and membranes. Electrospinning is one of the simplest and cheapest methods to make nano-porous polymer membranes, and these offer a large surface area-to-volume ratio, high porosity and small pore size. These electrospun nonwoven mats could be employed in myriad applications ranging from filtration, sensors, electrode materials, drug delivery, cosmetics, and tissue scaffolding. This technique can introduce novel functional characteristics, and hence by changing the basic experimental set up, solvent, solution and polymer characteristics can alter the composition, morphology, and porosity of the processed material. The unique structural and functional characteristics inherited at submicron to nanoscale dimensions via electrospinning makes it an attractive technique for advanced industrial applications.

In this paper, we developed and validated a simple and accurate thin layer chromatography method for the analysis of the chemical components in the plants of genus Lindera (the Lauraceae family). High performance liquid chromatography method was used to verify the results of thin layer chromatography analysis.

This work describes the synthesis of piperazine hydrochloride in multigram scale and high yields with promising industrial applications. This methodology is simple, fast, safe, low cost, and applicable to the synthesis of a wide variety of piperazine derivatives, being very useful in medicinal chemistry and other fields.

Carbon dots are small carbon nanoparticles with effective surface passivation by mostly organic species. For such a simple and well-defined nanoscale structure, the classical and most reliable synthesis is the use of pre-existing small carbon nanoparticles for surface chemical functionalization with organic molecules. However, a more popular synthetic approach in the literature has been the “one-pot” carbonization of organic precursors, which with appropriate processing conditions could in principle create local structures in the resulting dot-like entities that may be comparable to the structural configuration in carbon dots, though the carbonization can also easily produce colored organic materials crosslinked into the sample structures. An extreme example was the thermal processing of the specific organic precursor mixtures including only citric acid with formamide or urea to yield samples of red/near-IR absorption and emission features, which prompted the claims of “red/near-IR carbon dots”. In reality, these spectral features have nothing to do with nanoscale carbon, let alone carbon dots, but simply associated with molecular dyes/chromophores produced in chemical reactions of the specific precursor mixtures under the thermal processing conditions intended for carbonization. In this work, the isolation and identification of the responsible molecular dyes/chromophores were pursued. The results present further evidence for the conclusion that the red/near-IR absorption and emission features have nothing to do with carbon dots.

The authors regret the unnoticed error occurred during the data transmission process while preparing the manuscript. We inadvertently included wrong set of images in Figure 1(A), Figure 3(A&D), Figure 4(A) and Figure 5(A&D) panels of original manuscript. The corrected figure panels are provided below.