Mechanical Fabrication of Silver Cap onto Silica Nanotubes

摘要

Template-synthesized silica nanotubes (SNTs) have proven to be an ideal multifunctional nanostructure for the biomedical applications such as drug delivery and bioseparation. Nanotubes provide the advantage over nanospheres in that their inner voids can be used for loading large amounts of drug molecules and the differential functionalization of the inner and outer surfaces of SNTs enables appropriate surface modifications compatible with their environment. In addition, due to the tubular shape of nanotubes, the open end of SNTs can be capped to encapsulate cargo molecules and thus may control drug/gene uptake and release rate.