Cellulose as a Scaffold for Self-Assembly: From Basic Research to Real Applications

Abstract

Cellulose has received a tremendous amount of attention both in academia and industry owing to its unique structural features, impressive physical-chemical properties, and wide applications. This natural polymer is originally used for packaging, paper, lightweight composites, and so forth and is now being developed for various new areas, such as antibacterial treatment, catalysis, water purification and separation, and biological and environmental analysis. In the current article, we summarize the recent developments in the self-assembly of cellulose with various species including metal ions and metal and metal oxide nanoparticles. Then we highlight several key application areas of cellulose-based composites by reviewing the recent representative literature in each area. A significant part of this review demonstrates some exciting innovations for a wide range of practical applications of cellulose-based composites. Some challenges are also discussed with a view toward future developments.

Reuse of red algae waste for the production of cellulose nanocrystals and its application in polymer nanocomposites

“…Cellulose is one of the most abundant matter on the earth, and widely used for various industrial applications, due to its unique properties such as renewability, biodegradability, high tensile strength and stiffness, cost effectiveness, light weight and environmental benefits [1,2].…”

“…Since its discovery and isolation by Anselme Payen in 1838, the structure and properties of cellulose have been largely studied and highlighted in the literature [1,3]. Cellulose is naturally present in plants, marine animals, marine biomass, fungi, bacteria, and invertebrates, among others [2,4].…”

Exosome aggregation mediated stop‐flow paper‐based portable device for rapid exosome quantification

“…Presently, we proposed another approach to solve the heterogeneous migration of analytes on distance‐based PAD by a measurement of solvent migration distance. The concept relies on that (1) different analyte aggregation in a sample reservoir should cause distinct blockage leading to different solvent transport from a sample reservoir to a microchannel and (2) solvent velocity upon swelling in a microchannel depends on solvent transport from a sample reservoir . It is assumed that various analyte concentrations could aggregate under an optimal condition and block the solvent transport.…”

Facile Sol-gel Synthesis of Metaloxide Nanoparticles in a Cellulose Paper Template

“…Biomaterials and cellulose in particular are very attractive as templates providing a wide variety of shapes and sizes of the nanoparticles [5,6]. Moreover, they can be easily removed leaving the nanoparticles and their agglomerates free standing.…”

“…Cellulose fibers have already been demonstrated to perform as an efficient scaffold for assembling and immobilization of metal oxide nanoparticles synthesized by the sol-gel technique [6]. Meanwhile, a possibility to use them for fabrication of free standing ensembles of nanoparticles left upon burning off the cellulose template has been occasionally observed in a limited number of experiments: bundles of spongy nanofilaments of TiO 2 and ZrO 2 on a filter paper [9] and silk [10], TiO 2 nanoparticles [11] and ZnO/SiO 2 nanocomposites [12] on a cotton fabric.…”