Y’all know: one of these days it had to happen. When we created this blog, we almost called it something like “soot world”, indicating that what many chemists consider to be dirt, goo and soot in effect are interesting molecules, polymers or oligomers. Whatever. Cool stuff you can put in an nmr tube (anyone remember that famous NMR of ear wax?).
As I was browsing Angewandte Chemie the other day I found it: a paper called “Fluorescent Carbon Nanoparticles Derived from Candle Soot” DOI = 10.1002/ange.200701271 by Haipeng Liu, Tao Ye, and Chengde Mao. The latter being professor at Purdue University in Indiana.
This reall is the thing we were thinking of when starting this blog. Take basic carbon black, dirt, or in this case candle soot, do some magic — and boom. You get colorful stuff, even better fluorescent stuff!.
What is even more cool for the old biochemist in my brain: they separated the colorful carbon nanoparticles via electrophoresis (PAGE).
And since these nanoparticles are functionalized with carboxylic acids you can even attach stuff like proteins to their surface. Talking about cool, eh?
Go read the paper and be amazed 
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