Preparation of Silica Coated Magnetic Nanoparticles for Bioseparation

Magnetic nanoparticles have been intensively developed and applied in several biomedical applications such as targeted delivery, drug therapy, hyperthermia, magnetic resonance imaging and bioseparation etc. This work describes a simple and convenient method to synthesize silica coated Fe3O4 nanoparticles which have the potential to be used in the bioseparation of fetuin from fetal bovine serum and albumin from the egg. In this work, uniform Fe3O4 particles were prepared through the one-pot solvothermal process at 200 °C for 12 h using a sole iron precursor (FeCl3 · 6H2O) and then were coated with SiO2 to prepare silica coated Fe3O4 nanoparticles by hydrolysis and condensation of tetraethyl orthosilicate in ethanol and H2O medium. We further characterized the synthesized Fe3O4 and Fe3O4@SiO2 using XRD, SEM, TEM, FT-IR and VSM to study phase purity, morphology, size, functionality and magnetic properties.