| dc.description.abstract | Because of the population ageing in many countries, it can be expected that neurodegenerative diseases will produce many influences for the families, healthcare, society, and even economy aspects in the world. In the clinical data, the neurodegenerative diseases have presented a lot of symptoms, such as the neuronal loss, synaptic dysfunction and loss, oxidative stress increase, mitochondrial dysfunction, and etc. Consequently, developing multifunctional therapies to treat the neurodegenerative diseases is a curial subject. In this thesis, we reported a novel treatment for the neurodegenerative diseases. The carbon nanodot having the good biocompatibility and fascinating photoluminescence were fabricated as a nanocarrier by using the acid etching. After the surface functionalization to alter the fluorescence spectrum and enhance the efficiency of cell uptake, the carbon dots can be used as a nanoprobe for the bioimaging applications. According to the experimental results, the carbon dots with the polyethyleneimine functionalization keep low cytotoxicity and exhibit the superior efficiency of cell uptake, which is up to 99.35%. Through this approach, the presented carbon dots can successfully carry the plasmid DNA (pDNA) into the neurons to improve the low transfection efficiency of the neurons. This great improvement in the pDNA ingesting of neurons also promote their neurite outgrowth. The neurons with the neurite length over twice size of their soma is increased more than 50 %. Furthermore, the carbon dots can also be a platform to carry the natural drug, resveratrol, which is able to reduce the reactive oxygen species to prevent the damage of neurons. The presented carbon dots as the nanocarriers of pDNA and drugs provide a multi-functional treatment for the neurite outgrowth. Therefore, we believe that carbon nanocarriers have great potential in the therapeutic applications of neurodegenerative diseases. | en_US |