Fabrication of multifunctional Gd2O3/Au hybrid nanoprobe via a one-step approach for near-infrared fluorescence and magnetic resonance multimodal imaging in vivo.

Facile fabrication of multimodal imaging probes is highly desired for bioimaging application due to their integrated advantages of several imaging modalities. Here, we report a simple and one-step mild strategy to fabricate a multifunctional Gd2O3/Au hybrid nanoprobe. Bovine serum albumin (BSA) was used as the template in the biomineralization synthesis. The fabricated BSA-Gd2O3/Au nanoprobe showed excellent chemical stability, intense near-infrared (NIR) fluorescence, and good magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) ability. The multimodal imaging potential of the prepared multifunctional nanoprobe was demonstrated by successful NIR fluorescent and magnetic resonance blood pool imaging. Further modification of BSA-Gd2O3/Au with arginine-glycine-aspartic acid peptide c(RGDyK) (RGD) enabled the nanoprobe for targeted tumor imaging in vivo.