Luminescent Cd Te Quantum Dots/Albumin Conjugates: Preparation, Fluorescence, Characterization and Labeling of C. Elegans

摘要

Recently, semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) have attracted great interest as new luminescent biological probes. Compared with the conventional fluorophores QDs have the potential to overcome problems encountered by organic small molecules in certain fluorescent tagging applications, by combining the advantages of high photo-bleaching threshold, good chemical stability, broad excitation spectra, narrow and symmetric emission spectrum in the visible wavelength range, and readily tunable spectral properties. QD-protein conjugates were mostly characterized by UV-Vis spectrophotometer, spectrofluorometer, electrophoresis, etc. But the limitations of these methods such as the inability to get the pure component of the QD-protein conjugates and the detection results, which could also be influenced by other components, make it difficult to apply the conjugates to biological research. Here, we found that high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is a more efficient, fast, accurate, and reliable method compared to the published characterization and separation method. Size exclusion chromatography column was used.