Speaker: Dr. Sung Jun Lim (DGIST)

Subject: Engineering Fluorescent Semiconductor Nanocrystals for Bioimaging

Abstract

Colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals (NCs), widely known as quantum dots, are protein-sized fluorescent particles that have emerged as versatile fluorescent labels in biomolecular imaging. NCs exhibit many unique optical properties such as size-dependent emission color, narrow emission with broad absorption, and bright emission with long-term photostablility. Moreover, these light-emitting particles can be easily biologically functionalized by applying conventional bio-conjugation strategies. These features have enabled simultaneous imaging of multiple biomolecules and long-term tracking of single biomolecules, which were unfeasible with traditional fluorescent labels such as molecular dyes and fluorescent proteins. Furthermore, continuing efforts have been focused on not only to optimize aforementioned NC properties for their general use in bioimaging but also to engineer new NCs with unprecedented properties that are potentially suitable for advanced imaging and other biological applications. In this presentation, I will briefly explain general properties of NCs and their use in bioimaging. And discuss the current focuses on NC researches to engineer new NCs for advanced bio applications including developing NCs with equalized single-particle brightnesses for multi-color quantitative imaging [1], flat fluorescent NCs (nanoplatelets) showing unusually rapid cellular entry [2], and bright near-infrared emitting NCs for highly sensitive single biomolecular imaging.

References: 1. Lim et al., Brightness-Equalized Quantum Dots, Nat. Commun. 2015, 6, 8210. 2. Lim et al., Lipoprotein-Nanoplatelets: Brightly Fluorescent, Zwitterionic Probes with Rapid Cellular Entry, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2016, 138, 64.