Analysis of Carbohydrate-Carbohydrate Interactions Using Sugar-Functionalized Silicon Nanoparticles for Cell Imaging

Protein-carbohydrate binding depends on multivalent ligand display that is even more important for low affinity carbohydrate-carbohydrate interactions. Detection and analysis of these low affinity multivalent binding events are technically challenging. We describe the synthesis of dual-fluorescent sugar-capped silicon nanoparticles that proved to be an attractive tool for the analysis of low affinity interactions. These ultrasmall NPs with sizes of around 4 nm can be used for NMR quantification of coupled sugars. The silicon nanoparticles are employed to measure the interaction between the cancer-associated glycosphingolipids GM3 and Gg3 and the associated kD value by surface plasmon resonance experiments. Cell binding studies, to investigate the biological relevance of these carbohydrate-carbohydrate interactions, also benefit from these fluorescent sugar-capped nanoparticles.