Energy Transfer-Based Multiplex Analysis Using Quantum Dots
Abstract
Semiconductor nanocrystals, also known as quantum dots (QDs), have emerged as a significant new class of materials over the past decade. The capabilities of QDs – high quantum yield, improved sensitivity, high photostability, and size-tunable colors have paved the way for numerous studies including imaging, sensing and targeting biomolecules. Thus QDs are now rapidly replacing traditional fluorophores in almost all fluorescence-based applications. Unlike organic dyes and fluorescent proteins, QDs are sizetunable with non-overlapping emission band profiles due to their narrow and symmetric emission bands (full width at half maximum of 25–40 nm) that can span the light spectrum from the ultraviolet even to the infrared. As illustrated in Figure 1, this property enables the QDs to be useful for multiplexing assay in a single run (Chan et al., 2002; Jaiswal et al., 2003; Wu et al., 2003). Moreover, QDs typically have very broad absorption spectra with very large molar extinction coefficients (0.5–5×106 M−1 cm−1) (Hawrylak et al., 2000; Moreels and Hens, 2008). This makes QDs absorb 10–50 times more photons than organic dyes at the same excitation photon flux, providing a sufficient brightness for the sensing system (Gao et al., 2004). Owing to high photostability, QD-based sensing and imaging are favorable for continuous tracking studies over a long period of time. Most importantly, when the QD is harnessed in fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), several advantages…
Read the paper
Related studies
- Chaos and quantum thermalization
- The Dalton quantum chemistry program system
- Cord Blood Leptin and Adiponectin as Predictors of Adiposity in Children at 3 Years of Age: A Prospective Cohort Study
- Quantitative metabolomics by H-NMR and LC-MS/MS confirms altered metabolic pathways in diabetes
- Stable adiabatic quantum batteries
- A novel self-lipid antigen targets human T cells against CD1c(+) leukemias
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.