As the most abundant biopolymer in nature, cellulose has become a fascinating building block for the design of functional nanomaterials. Owing to the presence of numerous hydroxyl groups, cellulose provides a unique platform for the preparation of new materials via versatile chemical modifications. This critical review aims to present the advances about nanomaterials based on cellulose derivatives with the focus on cellulose esters within the last two decades, including the chemistry and application of these nanostructured materials. This review starts with the introduction on first fundamental aspects about diverse esterification techniques used up to now to modify cellulose. The in situ esterification for the isolation of nanocelluloses and diverse post esterification methods of nanocelluloses for the surface functionalization were highlighted in the following description. Various esterification strategies and further nanostructure constructions have been developed aiming to confer specific properties to cellulose esters, extending therefore their feasibility for highly sophisticated applications, which were summarized with respect to the categories of the introduced ester moieties. Thus, this review assembles and emphasizes the state-of-art knowledge of functional nanomaterials derived from diverse esterified cellulose compounds.

Exploring semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) with circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) is desirable to design optoelectronic devices owing to the easily tunable emission wavelengths and photophysical stability. In this study, through a co-assembly strategy, semiconductor QDs were encapsulated in cellulose nanocrystal (CNC)-based left-handed hierarchical photonic films, which resulted in circularly polarized luminescent nanomaterials with right-handed polarization, full-color tunable wavelengths, and tailored dissymmetry factors (g_lum). The CPL wavelength was manipulated by the emission wavelength of the semiconductor QDs. The photonic band gaps (PBGs) and handedness that spanned the visible spectrum were controlled by the glycerol content in the co-assembled photonic films. This enabled tunable CPL from the green-emitting QDs with a tailored maximum g_lum from −0.48 to −0.21, which is considerable for semiconductor nanomaterials. Based on the circularly polarized information in the ground state and excited state, CPL photonic films were developed as optical labels to encode and decode information.