Despite the modern treatment processes, contamination of food, water and medical equipment by pathogenic bacteria is very common in this world. Since the last two decades, one of the most important and complex problems our society has been facing is that several human pathogens became resistant to most of the clinically approved antibiotics. Recent advancement in nanoscience and nanotechnology has expanded our ability to design and construct nanomaterials with targeting, therapeutic, and diagnostic functions. These multifunctional materials have attracted our attention to be used as the promising tool for selective bacteria sensing and therapy without the current drugs. This tutorial review provides the basic concepts and critical properties of the different nanostructures that are useful for the pathogen detection and photothermal applications. In addition, bio-conjugated nanomaterial based strategies have been discussed with the aim to provide readers an overview of exciting opportunities and challenges in this field.

This review reports recent advances in the development of long-range nanomaterial-based optical rulers.

Quantum confined materials have been extensively studied for photoluminescent applications. Due to intrinsic limitations of low biocompatibility and challenging modulation, the utilization of conventional inorganic quantum confined photoluminescent materials in bio-imaging and bio-machine interface faces critical restrictions. Here, we present aromatic cyclo-dipeptides that dimerize into quantum dots, which serve as building blocks to further self-assemble into quantum confined supramolecular structures with diverse morphologies and photoluminescence properties. Especially, the emission can be tuned from the visible region to the near-infrared region (420 nm to 820 nm) by modulating the self-assembly process. Moreover, no obvious cytotoxic effect is observed for these nanostructures, and their utilization for in vivo imaging and as phosphors for light-emitting diodes is demonstrated. The data reveal that the morphologies and optical properties of the aromatic cyclo-dipeptide self-assemblies can be tuned, making them potential candidates for supramolecular quantum confined materials providing biocompatible alternatives for broad biomedical and opto-electric applications.