Recently, Ph.D. student Yuqing Dong from BEBC has published his first author research in Nanotechnology  entitled "Fabrication of Fluorescent Composite Hydrogel Using in situ Synthesis of Upconversion Nanoparticles".

This research work combines with biomedical hydrogel material and upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) to realize the fabrication of novel composite hydrogel with unique upconversion fluorescence property. Employing the three-dimension network structure of hydrogel as nano-reaction template, the regulation of UCNPs in shape, size, phase structure and fluorescence intensity is well performed. Meanwhile, the composite hydrogel possesses the ability of deep tissue imaging and long-term detection owing to the joint of UCNPs. The characterization works including UCNPs shape, size, phase, fluorescence intensity, hydrogel mechanical property and in vitro mimicking experiments strongly prove the feasibility of fluorescent composite hydrogel applied in long-term, deep-tissue fluorescence detection. This paper has important reference value in UCNPs synthesis, hydrogel mechanical property regulation and long-term, deep-tissue fluorescence detection fields.

This work went through long time revising and submitting course, some of the co-authors were graduated. In this regard, Yuqing said, “This paper contains many great efforts from the BEBC Upconversion materials Team. Thanks for the BEBC and the help of all co-authors. We all witnessed that our BEBC has kept growing in the last year and it will become stronger. I hope everyone will make progress in the new year and keep breaking his/her own limits”.

The work is under the guidance of vice professor Min Lin and Professor Feng Xu. The co-authors of the paper include vice professor Guorui Jin, Yong Il Park, Mushu Qiu, Ying Zhao, Professor Hui Yang, Professor Ang Li and Professor Tianjian Lu.