NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering (NGS), National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Chemistry. 2011 Jun 6;17(24):6696-706. doi: 10.1002/chem.201003632. Epub 2011 May 3.
We describe here a facile and benign synthetic strategy to integrate the fluorescent behavior of conjugated polymers and superparamagnetic properties of iron oxide nanocrystals into silica nanocapsules, forming a new type of bifunctional magnetic fluorescent silica nanocapsule (BMFSN). The resultant BMFSNs are uniform, colloidally stable in aqueous medium, and exhibit the desired dual functionality of fluorescence and superparamagnetism in a single entity. Four conjugated polymers with different emissions were used to demonstrate the versatility of employing this class of fluorescent materials for the preparation of BMFSNs. The applicability of BMFSNs in cellular imaging was studied by incubating them with human liver cancer cells, the result of which demonstrated that the cells could be visualized by dual-mode fluorescence and magnetic resonance imaging. Furthermore, the superparamagnetic behavior of the BMFSNs was exploited for in vitro magnetic-guided delivery of the nanocapsules into the cancer cells, thereby highlighting their potential for targeting biomedical applications.
我们在这里描述了一种简便且温和的合成策略，将共轭聚合物的荧光性质和氧化铁纳米晶体的超顺磁性集成到硅纳米胶囊中，形成一种新型的双功能磁性荧光硅纳米胶囊（BMFSN）。所得的 BMFSN 均匀，在水介质中具有胶体稳定性，并在单个实体中表现出荧光和超顺磁性的所需双重功能。使用了四种具有不同发射的共轭聚合物来证明使用此类荧光材料制备 BMFSN 的多功能性。通过将 BMFSN 与肝癌细胞孵育来研究其在细胞成像中的适用性，结果表明可以通过双模荧光和磁共振成像来观察细胞。此外，BMFSN 的超顺磁性被用于体外磁性引导纳米胶囊进入癌细胞，从而突出了它们在靶向生物医学应用中的潜力。
