Golden perspective: application of laser-generated gold nanoparticle conjugates in reproductive biology

The current demand for female calves has grown rapidly and controlling the sex of offspring provides an economically flexible management for the livestock producer. The only functioning method of efficiently producing separate populations of X and Y sperm in mammals is based on relative DNA differentiation by high-speed flow cytometry. In this context, gold nanoparticles conjugated to sex chromosome-specific moieties display promising application as novel fluorophor-alternative for the high-throughput screening, since they feature no photo bleaching, high quantum yield, good biocompatibility and the possibility of non-destructive membrane penetration. Especially, gold nanoparticles fabricated by pulsed laser ablation are in the recent focus of interest, due to excellent biocompatibility, fabrication-dependent, tuneable particle size as well as surface charge and ease of (bio)-functionalization with a remarkably strong ligand binding. For the purpose of our studies functionalized gold nanoparticles may be used as novel markers for sex-sorting of mammalian sperm and, depending on the selected probe, also for the selection of sperm with heritable DNA-sequences interesting for animal breeding.