Stimulus-Responsive Ultrathin Films for Bioapplications: A Concise Review

The term “nanosheets” has been coined recently to describe supported and free-standing “ultrathin film” materials, with thicknesses ranging from a single atomic layer to a few tens of nanometers. Owing to their physicochemical properties and their large surface area with abundant accessible active sites, nanosheets (NSHs) of inorganic materials such as Au, amorphous carbon, graphene, and boron nitride (BN) are considered ideal building blocks or scaffolds for a wide range of applications encompassing electronic and optical devices, membranes, drug delivery systems, and multimodal contrast agents, among others. A wide variety of synthetic methods are employed for the manufacturing of these NSHs, and they can be categorized into (1) top-down approaches involving exfoliation of layered materials, or (2) bottom-up approaches where crystal growth of nanocomposites takes place in a liquid or gas phase. Of note, polymer template liquid exfoliation (PTLE) methods are the most suitable as they lead to the fabrication of high-performance and stable hybrid NSHs and NSH composites with the appropriate quality, solubility, and properties. Moreover, PTLE methods allow for the production of stimulus-responsive NSHs, whose response is commonly driven by a favorable growth in the appropriate polymer chains onto one side of the NSHs, resulting in the ability of the NSHs to roll up to form nanoscrolls (NSCs), i.e., open tubular structures with tunable interlayer gaps between their walls. On the other hand, this review gives insight into the potential of the stimulus-responsive nanostructures for biosensing and controlled drug release systems, illustrating the last advances in the PTLE methods of synthesis of these nanostructures and their applications.