Functional nanoparticles and polymeric beads: From preparations to potential bioapplications

PMSE 103

Yunhua Yang, gaogroup@iccas.ac.cn, Fengqin Hu, gaogroup@iccas.ac.cn, Chifeng Tu, gaogroup@iccas.ac.cn, Zhen Li, gaomy@iccas.ac.cn, and Mingyuan Gao, gaomy@iccas.ac.cn. Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhong Guan Cun, Bei Yi Jie 2, Beijing, 100080, China
Over the past years, inorganic nanoparticles, especially fluorescent quantum dots and magnetic nanocrystals, have been demonstrated to be potentially useful in various applications ranging from bioassays to clinical diagnosis. There are mainly two different ways to utilize the inorganic nanoparticles in these applications, i.e., to directly use these nanoparticles at single particle levels or to assemble the nanoparticles into microbeads. The former way requires nanoparticles having water-solubility, biocompatibility and availability of surface reactive moieties in addition to high performance of intrinsic physical properties of nanoparticles. The second way requires effective encapsulation of the inorganic nanoparticles into bead matrices. Herein, we present our recent progress in preparations of highly fluorescent CdTe dots, biocompatible magnetic Fe3O4 nanocrystals as well as their in vivo and in vitro applications in cancer detections. Moreover, we will also present preparations of functional microbeads whose properties are tailored by inorganic nanoparticles incorporated.