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Updated: Apr 22, 2026
Synthesis of Near-Infrared Emitting Gold Nanoclusters for Biological Applications
Published on: March 22, 2020
Intrinsic enzyme mimicking activity of gold nanoclusters upon visible light triggering and its application for
Guang-Li Wang1, Lu-Yi Jin2, Yu-Ming Dong2
1The Key Laboratory of Food Colloids and Biotechnology, Ministry of Education, School of Chemical and Material Engineering, Jiangnan University, Wuxi 214122, PR China; State Key Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry for Life Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, PR China.
Abstract:
In this research, a novel enzyme mimetics based on the photochemical property of gold nanoclusters was demonstrated. It was found that the bovine serum albumin (BSA) stabilized red or blue emitting gold nanoclusters (Au NCs) exhibited enzyme-like activity under visible light irradiation. The BSA-Au NCs had better stability against stringent conditions compared to natural enzyme. In addition, the photostimulated enzyme mimetics of BSA-Au NCs showed several unprecedented advantages over natural peroxidase or other existing alternatives based on nanomaterials, such as the independence of hydrogen peroxide on activity and the easily regulated activity by light irradiation. The mechanism of the photoresponsive enzyme-like activity of BSA-Au NCs was investigated. The photoactivated BSA-Au NCs was designed to develop a facile, cheap, and rapid colorimetric assay to detect trypsin through trypsin digestion of the protein template of BSA-stabilized Au NCs. The limit of detection for trypsin was 0.6 μg/mL, which was much lower than the average level of trypsin in patient's urine or serum.
