Advances in gene editing are leading to new medical interventions where patients’ own cells are used for stem cell therapies and immunotherapies. One of the key limitations to translating these treatments to the clinic is the need for scalable technologies for engineering cells efficiently and safely. Toward this goal, microfluidic strategies to induce membrane pores and permeability have emerged as promising techniques to deliver biomolecular cargo into cells. As these technologies continue to mature, there is a need to achieve efficient, safe, nontoxic, fast, and economical processing of clinically relevant cell types. We demonstrate an acoustofluidic sonoporation method to deliver plasmids to immortalized and primary human cell types, based on pore formation and permeabilization of cell membranes with acoustic waves. This acoustofluidic-mediated approach achieves fast and efficient intracellular delivery of an enhanced green fluorescent protein-expressing plasmid to cells at a scalable throughput of 200,000 cells/min in a single channel. Analyses of intracellular delivery and nuclear membrane rupture revealed mechanisms underlying acoustofluidic delivery and successful gene expression. Our studies show that acoustofluidic technologies are promising platforms for gene delivery and a useful tool for investigating membrane repair.

Biphenyl, as the elementary unit of organic functional materials, has been widely used in electronic and optoelectronic devices. However, over decades little has been fundamentally understood regarding how the intramolecular conformation of biphenyl dynamically affects its transport properties at the single-molecule level. Here, we establish the stereoelectronic effect of biphenyl on its electrical conductance based on the platform of graphene-molecule single-molecule junctions, where a specifically designed hexaphenyl aromatic chain molecule is covalently sandwiched between nanogapped graphene point contacts to create stable single-molecule junctions. Both theoretical and temperature-dependent experimental results consistently demonstrate that phenyl twisting in the aromatic chain molecule produces different microstates with different degrees of conjugation, thus leading to stochastic switching between high- and low-conductance states. These investigations offer new molecular design insights into building functional single-molecule electrical devices.

Among these studies, the plasmon-induced effects on light, energy and carrier at the metal/semiconductor contact interface play the decisive role in the performance of the hybrid nanostructures. Here, we aim to timely summarize recent systematical progresses on the investigations of the working mechanisms and infl uencing factors of plasmon-induced electromagnetic fi eld enhancement, plasmonic hot electron generation/injection, and energy transfer effects at the metal/semiconductor interface, as well as the strategies developed for controlling and utilizing these interfacial effects for specifi c applications of the metal/semiconductor nanocomposites. For other various aspects of plasmonic energy conversion, such as plasmon-induced hot electron generation at nanoparticle/metal-oxide interfaces [ 2g ] and the effects of plasmonic dephasing/geometry on solar energy harvesting, [ 2h ] interested readers are recommended to learn previous excellent reviews (Ref.[2] and references therein). Plasmon-Induced Interfacial Electromagnetic Field EnhancementDue to the plasmonic resonance properties of metal nanostructures, a powerful ability of metallic nanostructures is to concentrate light into deep-subwavelength volumes. In this section, we focus an overview on plasmon-induced light manipulation at the metal/semiconductor interface, a crucial factor for plasmonic enhancement applications of metal/semiconductor heterostructures, which was unfortunately neglected in a few previous excellent reviews [ 1a,b ] where only light concentration and manipulation by intrinsic nanometallic structures have been summarized. Coupling Between Plasmonic Metals and Dielectric SemiconductorsIn metal/semiconductor heterostructures, the intrinsic plasmon-induced light scattering effect of plasmonic metals can scatter light into the underlying semiconductor layer, especially for metallic nanoparticles with large sizes (>50 nm). [ 3 ] In addition to this fact, the screening effect of dielectric semiconductors could affect the intrinsic plasmon resonance of plasmonic nanostructures, which could be used for enhancing light concentration at the metal/semiconductor interface. In detail, Plasmonic manipulation of light in metal/semiconductor heterostructures is a powerful tool that exploits extraordinary optical properties of metallic nanostructures to concentrate and control light at the nanometer scale. Here, recent progresses in the mechanism and strategies developed for the control of plasmon-induced optical fi eld distribution, hot electron injection and energy transfer at the metal/semiconductor heterostructure interface are discussed. This is of crucial importance to the selection of matched materials, the design of optimized device architectures and the future development of effi cient fabrication technologies for plasmon-enhanced photocatalytic and photovoltaic applications.