Solvent Magic for Organic Particles.

Abstract

Organic particles have attracted extensive attention due to their broad scientific and industrial applications. Solvents play important roles in producing organic particles with fine-tuned sizes, shapes, and surface morphologies, thus the advancement of microfluidic devices with a thorough understanding of solvent miscibility offers additional opportunities to fabricate organic particles in large quantities. In this issue of ACS Nano, Chen et al. report that solvents could play a seemingly magical role in switching both reaction directions and particle morphologies from the same starting materials. Through monitoring the particle formulation kinetics, both social self-sorting and narcissistic self-sorting mechanisms have been proposed, which offer powerful methods to yield organic particles with desirable shapes and compositions.