Luminescent silicon quantum dots (Si QDs) have great potential for use in biological imaging and diagnostic applications. To exploit this potential, they must remain luminescent and stably dispersed in water and biological fluids over a wide range of pH and salt concentration. There have been many challenges in creating such stable water-dispersible Si QDs, including instability of photoluminescence due their fast oxidation in aqueous environments and the difficulty of attaching hydrophilic molecules to Si QD surfaces. In this paper, we report the preparation of highly stable aqueous suspensions of Si QDs using phospholipid micelles, in which the optical properties of Si nanocrystals are retained. These luminescent micelle-encapsulated Si QDs were used as luminescent labels for pancreatic cancer cells. This paves the way for silicon quantum dots to be a valuable optical probe in biomedical diagnostics.

No abstract

We describe and demonstrate a general strategy for engineering binary and ternary hybrid nanoparticles based on spontaneous epitaxial nucleation and growth of a second and third component onto seed nanoparticles in high-temperature organic solutions. Multifunctional hybrid nanoparticles that combine magnetic, plasmonic, and semiconducting properties and that are tunable in size and morphology can be realized, as demonstrated for combinations of Au, Fe3O4 and PbS or PbSe. The properties of each component within the hybrids can be modulated strongly by the conjugating component(s) aided by the coherent interfaces between them.

Bionanocombinatorics is an emerging field that aims to use combinations of positionally encoded biomolecules and nanostructures to create materials and devices with unique properties or functions. The full potential of this new paradigm could be accessed by exploiting specific noncovalent interactions between diverse palettes of biomolecules and inorganic nanostructures. Advancement of this paradigm requires peptide sequences with desired binding characteristics that can be rationally designed, based upon fundamental, molecular-level understanding of biomolecule-inorganic nanoparticle interactions. Here, we introduce an integrated method for building this understanding using experimental measurements and advanced molecular simulation of the binding of peptide sequences to gold surfaces. From this integrated approach, the importance of entropically driven binding is quantitatively demonstrated, and the first design rules for creating both enthalpically and entropically driven nanomaterial-binding peptide sequences are developed. The approach presented here for gold is now being expanded in our laboratories to a range of inorganic nanomaterials and represents a key step toward establishing a bionanocombinatorics assembly paradigm based on noncovalent peptide-materials recognition.