Additive-Enhanced Crystallization of Inorganic Perovskite Single Crystals for High-Sensitivity X-Ray Detection.

Inorganic cesium lead halide perovskite single crystals are particularly intriguing to ionizing radiation detection by virtue of their material stability and high attenuation coefficients. However, the growth of high-quality inorganic perovskite single crystals remains challenging, mainly due to the limited solubility. In this work, an additive-enhanced crystallization method is proposed for cesium lead perovskites. The additive can remarkably increase the solubility of cesium bromide in dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) forming a balanced stoichiometric precursor solution, which prevents the formation of impurity phases. In addition, the additives would react with DMSO generating glyoxylic acid (GLA) via nucleophilic substitution and Kornblum oxidation reactions. The GLA can form stable PbBr2 -DMSO-GLA complexes, which enables better crystallinity, uniformity and much longer carrier lifetimes for the grown single crystals. The X-ray detectors using the additive-enhanced crystals exhibit an ultra-high sensitivity of 3.0 × 104  µC Gyair -1 cm-2 which is more than two orders of magnitude higher than that for the control devices.

A Novel Manganese Ion Delivery Carrier Promotes Immune Cell Proliferation and Enhances Innate Immune Responses.

Manganese is a transition metal that is an essential trace element for human health. Manganese ions (Mn2+), which serve as one of the most common transition metal ions, play vital roles in enhancing innate immune responses. However, immune agonists based on Mn2+ are poorly utilized in clinical trials due to poor chemodynamics and adverse events. In this work, we designed a novel delivery carrier for loading manganese ions by constructing hFn-MT3(Mn2+) protein nanoparticles (termed as NPs(Mn2+)), which contained human ferritin heavy chain (hFn) and metallothionein-3 (MT3), induced by isopropyl ß-d-thiogalactoside (IPTG) and manganese ions in the prokaryotic expression system. The NPs(Mn2+) protein nanoparticles could not only stimulate immune cell proliferation but also activate innate immune responses via the cGAS-STING-IRF3 signaling pathway. Collectively, our results unveil a candidate strategy for delivering metal ions beyond Mn2+ and may broaden metal ion clinical use in the field of immunotherapies.