碳纳米材料是一类具有广泛应用的创新材料，特别在先进的生物成像和治疗方面。它们具有可调节、综合优势的结构自由度、化学和热稳定性、直立电导性以及规模化和大规模生产的选择。在纳米医学的背景下，碳纳米材料已被广泛用于减少常规化疗的严重副作用，并促进癌症早期诊断，由于其可调节的范围广泛。一类碳纳米材料，称为碳点（CDs），是小型碳基纳米颗粒，由于其光致发光、低光漂白和高表面积与质量比而成为一项有价值的发现。目前，生产这些CD的过程需要高能耗的湿化学纯化过程。我们小组最近提出了一种来自燃油丰富的燃烧反应器的一步可调节的发光CDs的生产方法。在本文中，我们探讨了这些黄色发光的燃烧生成CDs在MCF7腺癌和MCF10a正常乳腺上皮细胞中的效果。我们观察到，这些CDs，在非毒性剂量下，可以影响基本细胞功能，如细胞周期和增殖，对细胞膜的物理参数产生实质性改变，并影响细胞的整体形态。

Carbon nanomaterials are an inventive class of materials with wide applications in state-of-the-art bioimaging and therapeutics. They allow a broad range of tunable and integrated advantages of structural flexibility, chemical and thermal stability, upright electrical conductivity, and the option of scale-up and mass production. In the context of nanomedicine, carbon nanomaterials have been used extensively to mitigate the serious side effects of conventional chemotherapy and also to enable early cancer diagnostics, given their wide range of tunable properties. A class of carbon nanomaterials, called carbon dots (CDs) are small carbon-based nanoparticles and have been a valued discovery due to their photoluminescence, low photobleaching, and high surface area to mass ratio. The process of producing these CDs had so far been a high energy demanding process involving wet chemistry for purification. A one-step tunable production of luminescent CDs from fuel rich combustion reactors was recently presented by our group. In this paper, we explore the effects of these yellow luminescent combustion-generated CDs in MCF7 adenocarcinoma and MCF10a normal breast epithelial cells. We observed that these CDs, also at nontoxic doses, can affect basic cellular functions, such as cell cycle and proliferation; induce substantial changes on the physical parameters of the plasma membrane; and change the overall appearance of a cell in terms of morphology.