Celebrating 100 years of chemistry at Nanjing University

In 2020, Nanjing University (NJU) celebrated its 100 years of chemistry research and education. Founded in 1920, the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering (SCCE) at NJU is one of the earliest and strongest chemistry institutions in China. After a century's development and evolution, it is now a globally leading school, dedicated to advancing the chemical sciences with cutting-edge research and world-renowned education. Nowadays, the school positions itself as a global center of excellence in chemistry, aiming to tackle scientific challenges and meet social needs via integrating its strength in chemistry across a full spectrum of disciplines – including synthetic chemistry, analytical chemistry, chemical engineering, chemical biology, theoretical and computational chemistry – with other disciplines such as life sciences, biomedicine, material science, energy science, environment science and so on.

To celebrate the legacy and future of the SCCE, in 2020 Analyst launched a themed collection of publications that reflects the recent scientific research profile of NJU on analytical chemistry and related disciplines. This themed issue is composed of two sectors: new papers dedicated to this special event and specially collected papers published over the past five years (2015–2020). Sector 1 has a collection of 12 papers, including 4 review papers and 8 research papers; while sector 2 has a collection of 24 papers, including 2 review papers and 22 research papers. This collection covers a large variety of hot research topics: bioimaging, biosensing, novel fluorescent probes (aggregation-induced emission probes, near-infrared fluorescent probes, etc.), single cell analysis, DNA origami, advanced nanomaterials (black phosphorus quantum dots, nanozymes, etc.) and so on. Although the collected papers are mainly contributed by the SCCE, representative papers are also collected from faculty members at other schools at NJU, including the School of Life Sciences, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and School of Medicine. As members of NJU, all the authors and the guest editors of this themed collection hope and believe that academics, students and researchers at NJU will open a new era of excellence in chemistry with soaring ambitions, unceasing innovation and unremitting persistence.

As the guest editors of this themed collection, we gratefully thank all the authors for their quality contributions. We also thank the editorial staff from the journal Analyst for their assistance and support. We expect that readers will enjoy reading these papers and get inspiration for their own research.

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