Folic acid modified gelatine coated quantum dots as potential reagents for in vitro cancer diagnostics

Journal of Nanobiotechnology

Research

Valérie A Gérard¹  Yurii K Gun'ko¹  Ciaran M Maguire¹  Despina Bazou² 

[1] School of Chemistry, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland;School of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland;

关键词: Quantum Dots;    Folic acid;    cancer;    bio-imaging;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1477-3155-9-50

 received in 2011-08-09, accepted in 2011-11-10,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundGelatine coating was previously shown to effectively reduce the cytotoxicity of CdTe Quantum Dots (QDs) which was a first step towards utilising them for biomedical applications. To be useful they also need to be target-specific which can be achieved by conjugating them with Folic Acid (FA).ResultsThe modification of QDs with FA via an original "one-pot" synthetic route was proved successful by a range of characterisation techniques including UV-visible absorption spectroscopy, Photoluminescence (PL) emission spectroscopy, fluorescence life-time measurements, Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) and Dynamic Light Scattering (DLS). The resulting nanocomposites were tested in Caco-2 cell cultures which over-express FA receptors. The presence of FA on the surface of QDs significantly improved the uptake by targeted cells.ConclusionsThe modification with folic acid enabled to achieve a significant cellular uptake and cytotoxicity towards a selected cancer cell lines (Caco-2) of gelatine-coated TGA-CdTe quantum dots, which demonstrated good potential for in vitro cancer diagnostics.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Gérard et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.