Size exclusion chromatography as a universal method for the purification of quantum dots bioconjugates

The bioconjugation of fluorescent quantum dots (QDs) and purification of QDs bioconjugates are of vital importance in bioapplications. In this paper, we systematically investigated the purification efficiency of QDs bioconjugates and their stability during separation process by using size exclusion chromatography (SEC) technique, fluorescence spectroscopy, and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS). In this study, commercial QDs and fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC) were used as labeling probes, and bovine serum albumin (BSA) and antibody (Erbitux) were used as mode samples. The covalently linkage and the electrostatic interaction were used in bioconjugation procedures. We systematically studied the effects of certain factors such as the scales of column, loading volume, elution buffer, and separation media on the purification efficiency of QDs bioconjugates by a home-built SEC device. And highly pure and monodisperse QDs bioconjugates could be obtained by SEC purification twice under the optimized conditions. Furthermore, we investigated the stability of QDs bioconjugates in different conjugation ways and purification conditions by FCS, and found that the stability of bioconjugates were poor when electrostatic binding mode was used. We also observed that Sephacryl S300 HR (separation range for globular proteins: 1 × 10(4) -1.5 × 10(6) Da) was the best choice for purifying the vast majority of QDs-bioconjugates. Our work described here will be constructive to popularization and applications of QDs in life science.