Speaker
Description
Hybrid materials composed of soft organic components and hard inorganic nanostructures exhibit emergent properties governed by their interfaces and by confinement effects at the nanoscale. Understanding and controlling these soft–hard interfaces is therefore central to designing functional materials for biomedical and bioinspired applications.
Here, we report a modular one-pot approach for the synthesis of graphene-based two-dimensional hybrid nanomaterials integrating plasmonic gold and/or palladium nanoparticles together with magnetite nanodomains. The graphene oxide scaffold acts as a flexible, chemically tunable soft interface that mediates nanoparticle organization and interactions with biomolecular environments, while the embedded inorganic domains provide optical, magnetic, catalytic, and photothermal functionalities. Comprehensive physicochemical characterization reveals how nanoparticle distribution, surface chemistry, and colloidal stability arise from the interplay between soft carbonaceous sheets and rigid inorganic nanostructures. To probe molecular processes at the bio–nano interface, multiscale simulations combining density functional theory, atomistic molecular dynamics, and coarse-grained modelling were used to investigate adsorption, orientation, and dynamic restructuring of proteins and peptides on the hybrid surfaces under confinement. Biological experiments in cancer cell models demonstrate that interfacial design directly controls cellular uptake, optical traceability, and photothermal and nanozyme-mediated activity. These results highlight how soft-matter concepts—interfacial energetics, nanoscale confinement, and hierarchical organization—can guide the rational design of multifunctional hybrid nanomaterials with tunable biological responses.