Nanostructured Luminescent Micelles: Efficient “Functional Materials” for Sensing Nitroaromatic and Nitramine Explosives
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The review describes the use of Nanostructured luminescent micelles as efficient “Functional Materials” for sensing nitroaromatic and nitramine explosives. The review is generally well presented and gives sufficient information for the reader about this field. However, I still suggest the authors add more revisions primarily including some further explanation about chemicals. The quality of the manuscript is satisfactory. Minor revisions are needed to improve the quality of the manuscript and ensure that the review delivers its initial purpose
Followings have to be addressed,
1. Intermolecular charge/electron transfer (CT/ET) were defined in the abstract, however, it was be done again in the introduction.
2. You highlight the fact that your review describe supramolecular micellar system for forensic applications, what is your motivation?
3. For the further development of ions and metal sensing, I refer you the following papers: “Chemical Engineering Journal 397, 125431” and “ACS applied materials & interfaces 9 (19), 16381-16396” to highlight the versatility of the sensing material area.
4. The introduction and discussion part should expand more on the nitramine and nitroaromatic compound and their characteristics and the importance of sensing such highly explosive compounds.
Author Response
Reviewer: 1:
The review describes the use of Nanostructured luminescent micelles as efficient “Functional Materials” for sensing nitroaromatic and nitramine explosives. The review is generally well presented and gives sufficient information for the reader about this field. However, I still suggest the authors add more revisions primarily including some further explanation about chemicals. The quality of the manuscript is satisfactory. Minor revisions are needed to improve the quality of the manuscript and ensure that the review delivers its initial purpose.
Author’s response: We appreciate all the positive comments regarding our work.
(1) Followings have to be addressed,
Intermolecular charge/electron transfer (CT/ET) were defined in the abstract, however, it was be done again in the introduction.
Author’s response: We appreciate this suggestion. As detailed in the manuscript, we already discussed thoroughly the CT/ET based mechanism for luminescence sensing of analytes, because this is one of the important aspects. All the related sentences are properly highlighted in the revised manuscript for your kind notification.
(2) You highlight the fact that your review describe supramolecular micellar system for forensic applications, what is your motivation?
Author’s response: We appreciate your query about the motivation of the direction of our research. We are working on this research area to explore various micellar luminophoric systems to see the effect of luminescence in presence of various analytes and pollutants with major emphasis on their application in explosive sensing. We are trying to extend our knowledge on explosive sensing in each medium including natural resources. For example we are collecting the samples from mining and road construction sites to analyse the efficiency and effectiveness of our technique, where common explosive materials are used. It is well-known that some explosives are insoluble or sparingly soluble in water and sensing of those materials are extremely challenging tasks for the forensic investigators. However, these amphiphilic micellar systems could be the better choice for explosive sensing that might work under aqueous medium. As described in the main text, we described why these micellar luminophore based sensing platforms offers various advantages, e.g., (i) enhanced emission intensity of the monomer or excimer through vibrational rigidity, (ii) selective site binding with metal ions as compared to bulk phase, (iii) mimicking biological membrane-like systems and in vivo sensing feasibility, (iv) selective and sensitive sensing of metal ions through enhanced emission of organic luminophore via controlled binding, (v) the use of lipophilic fluorophores in aqueous medium solubilized by micelles, etc. to name a few. Based on our experience, the application of these luminescent micellar systems for the detection of explosive traces in a real crime scene is also very appealing. The field is very interesting and has high potential for real time application which motivate us to explore this research area.
(3) For the further development of ions and metal sensing, I refer you the following papers: “Chemical Engineering Journal 397, 125431” and “ACS applied materials & interfaces 9 (19), 16381-16396” to highlight the versatility of the sensing material area.
Author’s response: We have gone through these two interesting references on luminescence sensing, however, our present review is exclusively focused on a very specific category of luminescent self-assembled micellar systems for sensing applications. One of the suggested references is a rhodamine-based nano-fiber used for heavy metal detection and another one is a review article based on similar morphology which do not fall in the micellar category. Unfortunately, we cannot connect these two suggested research articles with our texts which don’t fall in any category we wish to highlight and hence we regret to inform that we are unable to include these two references.
(4) The introduction and discussion part should expand more on the nitramine and nitroaromatic compound and their characteristics and the importance of sensing such highly explosive compounds.
Author’s response: We have now expanded the introduction section with more information on various nitramine and nitroaromatic explosives and have emphasized more on the importance of sensing. The change is highlighted.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
I read carefully the paper titled "Nanostructured Luminescent Micelles: Efficient “Functional Materials” for Sensing Nitroaromatic and Nitramine Explosives".
The manuscript is potentially interesting for the readers. As reviewer, I have some suggestions and comments.
1) The abstract is too long.
2) In the text is lack to literature references eg. line 526.
3) The authors only refer to 87 references, which is not a sufficient value in the case of a review article. What is the reason for such a small number of items?
4) Information on the time of luminescence decay is not provided
Author Response
Referee 2:
I read carefully the paper titled "Nanostructured Luminescent Micelles: Efficient “Functional Materials” for Sensing Nitroaromatic and Nitramine Explosives".
The manuscript is potentially interesting for the readers. As reviewer, I have some suggestions and comments.
Author’s response: We appreciate all the positive comments regarding our work.
(1) The abstract is too long.
Author’s response: We understand the reviewers point on the abstract. However, if we consider the abstract of a review article, 233 words are not too large! We could not find any restriction in author’s guide-line as well. Anyway, we tried to squeeze the abstract a little as per your suggestion by deleting some part.
(2) In the text is lack to literature references e.g., line 526.
Author’s response: We already cited in the first line. Zhang et al also reported an amphiphilic cellulose-based micelle encapsulated TPE based fluorophore for trace level detection of nitroaromatic explosives in water [81].
(3) The authors only refer to 87 references, which is not a sufficient value in the case of a review article. What is the reason for such a small number of items?
Author’s response: The field is still in its infancy state and we cited all the relevant references reported till date. Please note: This is a sub-area based on the “luminescent micellar systems” only. So, we are unable to find more references in this research area in current literature after a rigorous survey using various search engines. Moreover, we planned for a mini-review type of article for this special issue where we planned to summarize the recent results based on a very specific sub-area. There are plenty of references available describing explosive sensing, however, only a handful of examples are reported so far for explosive sensing with micellar systems.
4) Information on the time of luminescence decay is not provided
Author’s response: This is indeed a very good point. Thanks for this suggestion. We incorporated the lifetime values for few relevant systems reported in the literature. Unfortunately, most of the research articles did not focus on the luminescence decay/excited state lifetime studies, because they have different targets, and hence only few representative examples are incorporated in this article where the lifetime values were used to investigate the sensing mechanism.
We hope the quality of this revised manuscript is significantly improved and we are grateful to these referees.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
