Imaging is routinely used for clinical and diagnostic purposes, but techniques capable of high specificity and resolution for the early detection of nerve injury are still limited. In this study, we found that heat shock protein 27 (HSP27) becomes highly upregulated within 3 to 7 days of nerve injury. Taking advantage of this expression pattern, we conjugated gold nanorods (GNRs) to HSP27-speci...

Simultaneous detection and imaging of multiple intracellular biomarkers hold great promise for early cancer detection. Here, we introduce a four-color nanoprobe that can simultaneously detect and image four types of mRNAs in living cells. The nanoprobe composed of gold nanoparticles functionalized with a dense shell of molecular beacons, which can identify multiple intracellular mRNA transcript...

Gold nanoparticle-conjugated fluorescent hydroxyapatite (AuFHAp) was developed as a smart nanoprobe for measuring alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity. AuFHAp showed NIR fluorescence due to the hydrolysis of its phosphate groups by ALP. In addition, gold nanoparticles help reduce the nonspecific signal by absorbing nonspecific fluorescence. Through in vitro tests, we confirmed that the AuFHAp pr...

We report a fluorescent probe for mRNA detection. It consists of a gold nanorod (GNR) functionalized with fluorophore-labeled hairpin oligonucleotides (hpDNA) that are complementary to the mRNA of a target gene. This nanoprobe was found to be sensitive to a complementary oligonucleotide, as indicated by significant changes in both fluorescence intensity and lifetime. The influence of the surfac...

A gold nanoparticle was radiolabeled with (125)I and (111)In and functionalized with an MMP9-cleavable peptide to form a multispectral SPECT imaging contrast agent. Peptide cleavage from the nanoprobe by MMP9 was observed in vitro, and distinct pharmacokinetic properties of the contrast agent were observed between tumors with high or low MMP9 expression.

Gold nanoparticles functionalized with thiolated oligonucleotides (Au-nanoprobes) have been used in a range of applications for the detection of bioanalytes of interest, from ions to proteins and DNA targets. These detection strategies are based on the unique optical properties of gold nanoparticles, in particular, the intense color that is subject to modulation by modification of the medium di...

Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are widely used in biomedical diagnostics due to their unique plasmonic properties, with larger AuNPs showing higher extinction coefficients for the plasmon band and, consequently, more intense colors than commonly spherical 20 nm AuNPs. Other factors can be important performance of different-sized AuNPs, including surface area, colloidal stability, and curvature effe...

Due to their relevance as disease biomarkers and for diagnostics, screening of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) requires simple and straightforward strategies capable to provide results in medium throughput settings. Suitable approaches relying on isothermal amplification techniques have been evolving to substitute the cumbersome and highly specialized PCR amplification detection schemes. ...

As a well-known environmental pollutant but also an important gaseous transmitter, the specific detection of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is significant in biological systems. In this study, fluorosurfactant functionalized gold nanorods (FSN-AuNRs) have been proposed to act as selective colorimetric nanoprobes for H2S. With the combination of strong gold-S interactions and small FSN bilayer interstic...

The EPA's recommended maximum allowable level of inorganic mercury in drinking water is 2 ppb (10 nM). To our knowledge, the most sensitive colorimetric mercury sensor reported to date has a limit of detection (LOD) of 800 pM. Here, we report an instrument-free and highly practical colorimetric methodology, which enables detection of as low as 2 ppt (10 pM) of mercury and/or silver ions with th...