Lanthanide oxide nanoparticles in biology

Lanthanide oxide nanoparticles attract great interest as potential fluorescent labels for biological applications. They offer long fluorescence lifetimes (about 1 ms) and a lack of photo bleaching. These properties allow the label fluorescence to be separated from the short-lived bio fluorescence and make possible the development of new detection techniques in biochemistry. The morphology of the nanoparticles is of key importance for their application: they must be comparable in size and chemically compatible with bio molecules such as enzymes, proteins, antibodies, DNA etc. Nanoparticles also must have appropriate functional groups on their surface (or to be functionalized) in order to facilitate binding with bio molecules.