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Updated: Apr 25, 2026
Controlled Synthesis and Fluorescence Tracking of Highly Uniform PolyN-isopropylacrylamide Microgels
Published on: September 8, 2016
Fabrication of bright and small size semiconducting polymer nanoparticles for cellular labelling and single particle
Lin Wei1, Peng Zhou, Qingxiu Yang
1Key Laboratory of Chemical Biology & Traditional Chinese Medicine Research, Ministry of Education, Key Laboratory of Phytochemical R&D of Hunan Province, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan 410081, P. R. China. lehuixiao@gmail.com.
Abstract:
In this work, we demonstrate a convenient and robust strategy for efficient fabrication of high fluorescence quantum yield (QY, 49.8 ± 3%) semiconducting polymer nanoparticles (SPNs), with size comparable with semiconductor quantum dots (Qdots). The SPNs were synthesized by co-precipitation of hydrophobic semiconducting polymer together with amphiphilic multidentate polymer. Comprehensive spectroscopic and microscopic characterizations showed that the SPNs possess superior photophysical performance, with excellent fluorescence brightness and reduced photoblinking in contrast with Qdots, as well as good photostability compared to a fluorescent protein of a similar size, phycoerythrin. More importantly, by conjugating membrane biomarkers onto the surface of SPNs, it was found that they were not only suitable for specific cellular labelling but also for single particle tracking because of the improved optical performance.
