A novel "structural difference-based selective etching" strategy has been developed to fabricate hollow/rattle-type mesoporous nanostructures, which was achieved by making use of the structural differences, rather than traditional compositional differences, between the core and the shell of a silica core/mesoporous silica shell structure to create hollow interiors. Highly dispersed hollow mesoporous silica spheres with controllable particle/pore sizes could be synthesized by this method, which show high loading capacity (1222 mg/g) for anticancer drug (doxorubicin). Hemolyticity and cytotoxicity assays of hollow mesoporous silica spheres were conducted, and the synthesized hollow mesoporous silica spheres with large pores show ultrafast immobilization of protein-based biomolecules (hemoglobin). On the basis of this strategy, different kinds of heterogeneous rattle-type nanostructures with inorganic nanocrystals, such as Au, Fe(2)O(3), and Fe(3)O(4) nanoparticles, as the core and mesoporous silica as the shell were also prepared. This strategy could be extended as a general approach to synthesize various hollow/rattle-type nanostructures by creating adequate structural differences between cores and shells in core/shell structures in nanoscale.

In this work, the parallel tempering Monte Carlo (PTMC) algorithm is applied to accurately and efficiently identify the global-minimum-energy orientation of a protein adsorbed on a surface in a single simulation. When applying the PTMC method to simulate lysozyme orientation on charged surfaces, it is found that lysozyme could easily be adsorbed on negatively charged surfaces with "side-on" and "back-on" orientations. When driven by dominant electrostatic interactions, lysozyme tends to be adsorbed on negatively charged surfaces with the side-on orientation for which the active site of lysozyme faces sideways. The side-on orientation agrees well with the experimental results where the adsorbed orientation of lysozyme is determined by electrostatic interactions. As the contribution from van der Waals interactions gradually dominates, the back-on orientation becomes the preferred one. For this orientation, the active site of lysozyme faces outward, which conforms to the experimental results where the orientation of adsorbed lysozyme is co-determined by electrostatic interactions and van der Waals interactions. It is also found that despite of its net positive charge, lysozyme could be adsorbed on positively charged surfaces with both "end-on" and back-on orientations owing to the nonuniform charge distribution over lysozyme surface and the screening effect from ions in solution. The PTMC simulation method provides a way to determine the preferred orientation of proteins on surfaces for biosensor and biomaterial applications.

Hollow mesoporous carbon spheres (HMCSs) were used for the first time as a bilirubin adsorbent, which showed an extraordinarily high bilirubin adsorption capacity as compared with commercial activated carbon for haemoperfusion, high bilirubin adsorption selectivity and negligible hemolytic activity. The results are very attractive and promising for blood purification applications.

Employing conventional block copolymers as scaffold, a direct synthetic route of mesoporous zeolites has been developed with the assistance of post-steaming treatment. Such hierarchical micro/mesostructure demonstrated the greatly enhanced catalytic activity for probe reactions, such as cracking of triisopropylbenzene and esterification reactions involving bulky molecules, because of the increased external surface, and the diminished coke formation by the greatly shortened diffusion length in microporous networks.