The interaction between nanomaterials and living systems and their health effects is an important frontier scientific problem in the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology. As a typical graphene-like inorganic nanomaterial, molybdenum sulfide (MoS₂) nanosheets have unique advantages such as large specific surface area, abundant electronic energy band and enzyme-like activity, making it widely used in the fields of optoelectronics, sensing, catalysis, energy storage and conversion devices. In recent years, based on its advantages of high near-infrared photothermal conversion efficiency, easy surface modification and large surface area, nano-MoS₂ has also received extensive attention in the field of biomedicine. Therefore, it is very important to study its biological effects and safety. Due to the unique physical and chemical properties of nano-MoS₂, the traditional evaluation methods and techniques are unable to meet the needs of the research on the biological effects and safety of nanomaterials.

The analysis method based on synchrotron radiation X-ray has the characteristics of high spatial resolution, high sensitivity, and high intensity, which has great potential in exploring the biological species morphology/state, transport and interaction between nanomaterials and biological interfaces. Team of institute of high energy and physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences use the Beijing synchrotron radiation Facility (BSRF) X-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy (XANES) and transmission X-ray microscope imaging (SR-TXM) developed a series of new nano-biological effect analysis and characterization technology on the basis of transition metal sulfur/oxide nanomaterials. They used in-situ, dynamic synchronous radiation XANES and SR-TXM, combining with the conventional transmission electron microscopic imaging (TEM), inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS)  to study the different physical and chemical properties of transition metal sulfides with specific biological effect in the process of accumulation, distribution, and chemical conversion, metabolism kinetic behavior. They further illustrate the relationship between structure of nanomaterials in biological environment and biological effects. The results showed that distribution and metabolic behavior of different physical and chemical properties of nano-MoS₂ were significantly different in vivo, which provided an important basis for further studies on its long-term toxicity, in vivo metabolic behavior and structure-activity rules.

The work was published in Nanoscale, 2019, 11, 4767 -- 4780 (Hot Article 2019).The first authors of the paper is Linqiang Mei. The Prof Zhanjun Gu, Wenyan Yin and Chunjian Su are the corresponding authors of the paper.

Article:

Linqiang Mei, Xiao Zhang, Wenyan Yin, * Xinghua Dong, Zhao Guo, Wenhui Fu, Chunjian Su,* Zhanjun Gu* and Yuliang Zhao. Translocation, Biotransformation-Related Degradation, and Toxicity Assessment of Polyvinylpyrrolidone Modified 2H Nano-MoS₂. Nanoscale, 2019, 11, 4767–4780.