A new strategy for facile preparation of highly luminescent CdTe quantum dots (QDs) within amine-terminated hyperbranched poly(amidoamine)s (HPAMAM) was proposed in this paper. CdTe precursors were first prepared by adding NaHTe to aqueous Cd2+ chelated by 3-mercaptopropionic sodium (MPA-Na), and then HPAMAM was introduced to stabilize the CdTe precursors. After microwave irradiation, highly fl...

Fluorescent nanocrystals composed of semiconductor materials were first introduced for biological applications in the late 1990s. The focus of this review is to give a brief survey of biological applications of quantum dots (QDs) at the single QD sensitivity level. These are described as follows: 1) QD blinking and bleaching statistics, 2) the use of QDs in high speed single particle tracking w...

The use of quantum dots (QDs) for nanomedicine is hampered by their potential toxicologic effects and difficulties with delivery into the cell interior. We accomplished an in vivo study exploiting Daphnia magna and Xenopus laevis to evaluate both toxicity and uptake of QDs coated with the membranotropic peptide gH625 derived from the glycoprotein H of herpes simplex virus and widely used for dr...

Hydroxyl CdTe/CdS core/shell structure quantum dots (QDs) were synthesized using mercaptoethanol as stabilizer in aqueous under N2. In addition, the QDs coated with carbazole abutment styryl (TCQ) fluorescence dye were synthesized in room temperature, and the fluorescence properties were studied. The results indicated that the peak shift of QDs fluorescence spectra can mainly be due to the chan...

Recently, semiconductor nanoparticles such as quantum dots (QDs) have attracted significant attention for bioimaging. Complex chemical functionalization, surface modification, and bioconjugation chemistry are generally required to tag biomolecules to QDs for imaging of different biomarkers. In this study, we report a simple method for production of QDs stabilized by the small protein, Affibody ...

Semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) are light-emitting particles on the nanometer scale that have emerged as a new class of fluorescent labels for chemical analysis, molecular imaging, and biomedical diagnostics. Compared with traditional fluorescent probes, QDs have unique optical and electronic properties such as size-tunable light emission, narrow and symmetric emission spectra, and broad absor...

BACKGROUND Luminescent nanobioprobes with cell-targeting specificity are likely to find important applications in bioanalysis, biomedicine, and clinical diagnosis. Quantum dots (QDs) are unique and promising materials for such a purpose because of their fluorescence and large surface area for attaching cell-targeting molecules. METHODS We produced water-dispersible QDs by coating hydrophobic ...

Quantum dots (QDs) are highly fluorescent and stable probes for cellular and molecular imaging. However, poor intracellular delivery, stability, and toxicity of QDs in biological compartments hamper their use in cellular imaging. To overcome these limitations, we developed a simple and effective method to load QDs into polymersomes (Ps) made of poly(dimethylsiloxane)-poly(2-methyloxazoline) (PD...

Cadmium-free silver-indium-sulfide (Ag-In-S or AIS) chalcopyrite quantum dots (QDs) as well as their core-shell structures (AIS/ZnS QDs) are being paid significant attention in biomedical applications because of their low toxicity and excellent optical properties. Here we report a simple and safe synthetic system to prepare high quality AIS and AIS/ZnS QDs using thermal decomposition. The synth...

Quantum dots (QDs) are an attractive platform for building multimodality imaging probes, but the toxicity for typical cadmium QDs limits enthusiasm for their clinical use. Nontoxic, silicon QDs are more promising but tend to require short-wavelength excitations which are subject to tissue scattering and autofluorescence artifacts. Herein, we report the synthesis of paramagnetic, manganese-doped...