Polyphenol-Assisted Exfoliation of Transition Metal Dichalcogenides into Nanosheets as Photothermal Nanocarriers for Enhanced Antibiofilm Activity.

Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) nanosheets have evoked enormous research enthusiasm and have shown increased potentials in biomedical field. However, a great challenge lies in high-throughput, large-scale and eco-friendly preparation of TMDs nanosheets dispersions with high quality. Herein, we report a universal polyphenol-assisted strategy to facilely exfoliate various TMDs into monolayer or few-layer nanosheets. By optimizing the exfoliation condition of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), the yield and concentration of as-exfoliated nanosheets is up to 60.5% and 1.21 mg/mL, respectively. This is the most efficient aqueous exfoliation method at present and is versatile for the choices of polyphenols and TMDs nanomaterials. The as-exfoliated MoS2 nanosheets possess superior biomedical stability as nanocarriers to load antibiotic drug. They show high photothermal conversion effect and thus induce a synergetic effect of chemotherapy and photothermal therapy to harvest enhanced antibiofilm activity under near-infrared (NIR) light. All these results offer an appealing strategy toward the synthesis and application of ultrathin TMDs nanosheets, with great implications for their development.