In the last 20sh years the Carbon Nanostructures’ family grew and attract the attention of many researchers working in different fields. Many efforts in the studies of functionalization have been done, especially struggling with the necessity of an easy way to manipulate these structures. Solubility and orthogonal multiple functionalization are the main goals to be achieved when these materials have to be used for biological applications, as oligonucleotides vector, potential antiviral derivatives, or gene expression modulators. In this communication, an overview of the recent achievements will be presented. Figure 1

Carbon nanostructures (CNSs) can be efficiently up-taken by cells and this allowed their use as vectors. So with an opportune functionalization it is possible to immobilized on CNSs various compounds, from small molecules till proteins and oligonucleotides, and efficiently deliver those units into cells. The presence of CNSs can ameliorate the efficiency of the uptake, and at the same time can also contribute to protect the delivered molecules from degradation. We will explore some examples of effective use of CNSs for this purpouse.

The interest in application of carbon nanostructures for theranostics is growing, considering the importance this approach is assuming, as well as personalized medicine and nanomedicine. The family of carbon nanostructures presents some components which are intrinsically fluorescent while in other case the functionalization with well-known tags, among which fluorescein, can supply to the lack of this properties. In this contribution we will explore some biological studies of materials belonging to the two classes of nanostructures.

Since from the discovery of the new allotropic forms of carbon, their potential applications in many different fields appeared to be very interesting. The increasing of components in the Carbon NanoStructure (CNS) family is still widening these potentialities. However, in the majority of the cases, a chemical functionalization of these derivatives is needed and results to be challenging. We will survey the recent years’ achievements in this field on various CNSs.