Intracellularly and controllably biosynthesizing nanomaterials by 'Space-Time Coupling' of intracellular irrelated biochemical reaction pathways

摘要

Intrinsic properties of nanomaterials are mainly determined by their composition, crystallinity, structure, size, and shape. In principle, the properties of nanomaterials can be finely tuned by controlling any of these parameters. Quantum dots (QDs) with fantastic optical properties, such as broad excitation, size-dependent photoluminescence, unusual photochemical stability, single-excitation/multiple-emission, etc., have attracted much attention in biological imaging. QDs based bioprobes used in clinical practice or biosystems should be of biocompatibility, nontoxicity and small size. In general, existing QDs which usually contain toxic heavy metals are close to or larger than most biomacromolecules in size. The use of QDs in biolabeling may be limited due to their large size, which would interfere with both the recognition between QD-labeled bioprobes and target molecules due to steric hindrance and the movement of the bioprobes. So far, it is still a big challenge to controllably synthesize QDs with less toxicity and small size for bioimaging and biodetection.