Nanometer- and micrometer-sized particles are of increasing importance for a wide range of applications in the material and life sciences. This includes carriers for, e.g., drugs as well as dye molecules for use as multichromophoric reporters for signal enhancement in optical assays, platforms for DNA sequencing, and the fabrication of nanosensors and targeted probes for bioimaging studies.<br/>Application-relevant properties of such particles include their size (and size distribution), shape, colloidal stability, biocompatibility, and ease of subsequent functionalization, e.g., with linkers, sensor molecules, and targeting ligands. The latter requires knowledge of the number of groups effectively accessible for subsequent coupling reactions and hence, selective and sensitive methods of analysis, which can be ideally employed for the characterization of a broad variety of particle systems independent of their optical properties, i.e., scattering or the presence of encoding dyes. For product control, robust, reliable and fast methods performable with inexpensive equipment are prefered.<br/>In this respect, we studied a variety of conventional labels for optical readout, utilizing changes in intensity and/or color of absorption and/or emission. In addition, we developed a platform of cleavable and multimodal labels for optical assays which consist of a cleavable linker and an optically active reporter moiety. In contrast to conventional reporters measured directly at the particle surface, which are prone to signal distortions by scattering and encoding dyes, these cleavable labels can be detected colorimetrically or fluorometrically both bound at the particle surface and after quantitative cleavage of the linker in the transparent supernatant. Moreover, they enable straightforward validation by method comparison with elemental analysis, ICP-OES or ICP-MS.<br/>Here, we present representative examples of newly synthesized cleavable labels and their application for the quantification of amino, thiol and carboxy surface groups on different nanomaterials and compare these results with measurements using conventional optical labels.

Spectroscopic quantification of surface groups on micro- and nanoparticles with conventional and cleavable reporter

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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