Title
Ultrastable BSA-capped gold nanoclusters with a polymer-like shielding layer against reactive oxygen species in living cells
Author
Wenjuan Zhou, Yuqing Cao, Dandan Sui, Weijiang Guan, Chao Lu, Jianping Xie
Year
2016
Journal
Nanoscale
Abstract
The prevalence of reactive oxygen species (ROS) production and the enzyme-containing intracellular environment could lead to the fluorescence quenching of bovine serum albumin (BSA)-capped gold nanoclusters (AuNCs). Here we report an efficient strategy to address this issue, where a polymer-like shielding layer is designed to wrap around the Au core to significantly improve the stability of AuNCs against ROS and protease degradation. The key of our design is to covalently incorporate a thiolated AuNC into the BSA-AuNC via carbodiimide-activated coupling, leading to the formation of a AuNC pair inside the cross-linked BSA molecule. The as-designed paired AuNCs in BSA (or BSA-p-AuNCs for short) show improved performances in living cells.
Instrument
J-810
Keywords
Circular dichroism, Secondary structure, Ligand binding, Nanostructures, Biochemistry, Materials