Author Correction: Targeted tumour theranostics in mice via carbon quantum dots structurally mimicking large amino acids

Correction to: Nature Biomedical Engineering https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-020-0540-y, published online 30 March 2020.

In the version of this article originally published, incorrect sets of micrographs for A549 cells in Fig. 4a and for the NH₂-null LAAM TC-CQDs group in Fig. 6b were inadvertently used. The original and corrected figures are reproduced below. We were also informed of errors in a few figures in the Supplementary Information. In particular, we accidentally used a few duplicated sets of images for the RWPE-1, HL-7702, CCC-HPE-2 and CCC-HIE-2 cell lines in Supplementary Fig. 20, for the mice underlying the in vivo fluorescence images in Supplementary Fig. 29 (some images were duplicated from Supplementary Fig. 56; in this figure, we also had selected incorrect images for the 0-h timepoint of the TPTC group and for the 6-h timepoint of the TPTC/LAAM TC-CQDs), for the excised mouse organs in Supplementary Fig. 30 (some images were duplicated from Supplementary Fig. 38), and for the images of the heart and the spleen in the TPTC/LAAM TC-CQDs group in Supplementary Fig. 61 (the two micrographs had overlaps with those in the saline group). The original and corrected versions of these supplementary figures are also reproduced below. All these errors occurred when selecting representative images from the large datasets of images acquired, processed and stored in the core facilities that we used.

In addition, for Supplementary Fig. 25, we detected that we had used duplicated images for the 6-h and 8-h timepoints. As noted in the original manuscript (page 706; second column, last full paragraph), for the 8-h timepoint, “the concentration of LAAM TC-CQDs in the nuclei exceeded the concentration of LAAM TC-CQDs in the cytoplasm (Supplementary Fig. 25, Supplementary Video 1)”; therefore, we should only have shown data up to this timepoint, and the micrographs for the 10-h timepoint should have been labelled ‘8 h’. We also note that the middle and right sets of panels in Supplementary Fig. 52 were mislabelled (the original and corrected figure is reproduced below), that “25 wt%” should have been “5 wt%” (Supplementary Information, section “Synthesis of LAAM TC-CQD”), and that “Supplementary Tab. 2” should have been ‘Supplementary Tab. 3” (Supplementary Information, page 17). All versions of the article have been corrected.

Fig. 4a

Original and corrected.

Fig. 6b

Original and corrected.