Assembling and Powering Up Nanostructures!

This special issue, guest edited by Jwa-Min Nam, Chunhai Fan and Nathan Gianneschi, highlights emerging concepts and important advances in the directed assembly of nanostructures, their emergent properties, and applications. The assembly of small components into larger, more functional units in a programmed manner is a key process in nature used in the formation of biological structures and functioning living creatures. However, these ubiquitous processes are highly challenging to realize in man-made artificial systems. Therefore, we often miss, in synthetic systems, opportunities for accessing emergent properties. In recognition of this problem, a variety of powerful approaches are in development to assemble nanostructures with targeted functionalities, but not necessarily specifically targeted structure; a difficult problem to say the least. Such adventures have led to materials with wide ranging applications, including in photonics, optoelectronics, metamaterials, biosensors, bioimaging, drug delivery, cell/tissue engineering, catalysis and energy conversion/storage. Some successful approaches have involved guiding materials towards desired geometries using controlled surface interactions directed by programmed interactions including those inherent to biomolecules. Indeed, the use of molecules such as DNA, peptides, and polymers to guide nanomaterial formation and assembly has been an important step, particularly in programming materials to interface with external stimuli. This special issue highlights emerging concepts and important advances in the directed assembly of nanostructures, their emergent properties and applications. Complex, functional nanostructures can be accessed utilizing informational nucleic acids as guides, and the use of these structures, particularly for SERS and bioanalysis applications, has been discussed by Chao, Deng, Ding, Xiao, Lo and Zhao. In addition, Han, Tang, Zhao and Nam demonstrated that plasmonic nanostructures can be assembled to form clusters and chiral nanostructures, and these structures are especially useful for biodiagnostics. The power of polymers in assembling nanostructures, how ligand exchange can be utilized to control the chemistry and properties of nanoparticle superstructures, and the use of layer-by-layer assembled nanoparticle cocatalyst films for hydrogen evolution reaction are also showcased by Wu, Liu, Rosi and Teranishi in this issue. We sincerely hope this special issue provides insight into recent trends and strategies in the assembly of nanostructures and that the works found herein inspire researchers to capitalize on these opportunities for new, practical and exciting applications. Jwa-Min Nam received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Northwestern University and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently a Full Professor in Chemistry at Seoul National University and the Director of the Center for Innovative Nanobiomedical Technology, Seoul National University. He currently serves as a Vice-Chair, the Young Korean Academy of Science and Technology (Y-KAST) and the Vice-Chair, Division of International Cooperation, Korean Chemical Society, and is an elected member of the Global Young Academy and Y-KAST. He serves as an executive advisory board member for Small Methods (Wiley-VCH) and an editorial board member for ChemNanoMat (Wiley-VCH). His interests include chemical nanoplasmonics, plasmonic nanoprobes for biosensors, bioimaging and therapeutics, nanoparticle-tethered lipid bilayers, bio-computing and cell-nanostructure interfaces. Chunhai Fan received his B.S. and Ph.D. from the Department of Biochemistry at Nanjing University in 1996 and 2000. After his postdoctoral research at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), he joined the faculty at Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2004. He is now Professor and Chief of the Division of Physical Biology at SINAP and the Bioimaging Center of Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF). He is also an adjunct professor of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. He is a fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and an elected fellow of the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE). He serves as an Associate Editor of ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces and on the editorial board of over ten international journals including ChemNanoMat. Dr. Fan was recognized as a High Cited Researcher in 2014–2106 by Thomson Reuters. Nathan C. Gianneschi received his B.Sc (Hons) at the University of Adelaide, Australia in 1999. In 2005 he completed his Ph.D at Northwestern University. Following a Dow Chemical postdoctoral fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute, in 2008 he began his independent career at the University of California, San Diego where, until June 2017, he was Teddy Traylor Scholar and Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry, NanoEngineering and Materials Science & Engineering. In July of 2017, Gianneschi accepted a position at Northwestern University where he is currently Jacob & Rosaline Cohn Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science & Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering. The Gianneschi group takes an interdisciplinary approach to nanomaterials research with a focus on multifunctional materials with interests that include biomedical applications, programmed interactions with biomolecules and cells, and basic research into nanoscale materials design, synthesis and characterization. For this work he has been awarded the NIH Director′s New Innovator Award, the NIH Director′s Transformative Research Award and the White House′s highest honor for young scientists and engineers with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Prof. Gianneschi was awarded a Dreyfus Foundation Fellowship, is a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and is an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow.