Fluorescent silica manoparticles with well-separated intensity distributions from batch reactions

Kao, Teresa
Kohle, Ferdinand
Ma, Kai
Aubert, Tangi
Andrievsky, Alexander
Wiesner, Ulrich

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Publication date

January 2018

DOI

10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b04978

ISSN

1530-6984

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Abstract

Silica chemistry provides pathways to uniquely tunable nanoparticle platforms for biological imaging. It has been a long-standing problem to synthesize fluorescent silica nanoparticles (SNPs) in batch reactions with high and low fluorescence intensity levels for reliable use as an intensity barcode, which would greatly increase the number of molecular species that could be tagged intracellularly and simultaneously observed in conventional fluorescence microscopy. Here, employing an amino-acid catalyzed growth, highly fluorescent SNP probes were synthesized with sizes <40 nm and well-separated intensity distributions, as mapped by single-particle imaging techniques. A seeded growth approach was used to minimize the rate of secondary particle...