Download or read book Design and Synthesis of Ultra-bright Organic Nanoparticles (ONPs) for Bioimaging written by Paolo Pagano and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nowadays the use of bright luminescent nano-objects in biological environment is a topic that is gaining more and more importance, especially for biomedical applications such as imaging, the rapyand diagnostic. So far, numerous studies have been conducted with gold nanoparticles, silica nanoparticles (doped or functionalized with organic molecules), as well as semiconductor nanoparticles (quantum dots, i.e., QDs). However, most of these nanoparticles suffer from drawbacks (in terms of stability, biocompatibility, eco-toxicity or degradability). On the other hand, several nontoxic fluorescent molecular probes have been widely used, but most of the time their brightness remain modest in biological environments compared to QDs. Our idea is to engineer new organicchromophores with tunable emission wavelength (from visible to near infrared) for further preparation of organic fluorescent nanoparticles (so called FONs) that display giant one-photon and two-photonbrightness, as well as good colloidal and chemical stability, and suitable photostability for in vitro andin vivo imaging. As such, these FONs would represent interesting alternatives to QDs for use in bioimaging. This manuscript describes the synthesis and characterization of new classes of fluorescent molecules specifically engineered as building blocks for the fast preparation of such nanoparticles byself-aggregation in water. The FONs were fully characterized from both morphological and photophysical points of view and further used in bioimaging.