Recent advances in the synthesis, characterization, and biomedical applications of ultrasmall thiolated silver nanoclusters
With ultrasmall particle sizes of ∼1 nm, thiolate-protected silver nanoclusters (or thiolated Ag NCs) have recently emerged as an attractive frontier of nanoparticle research because of their unique molecular-like properties, such as well-defined molecular structures, HOMO-LUMO transitions, quantize...
Saved in:
| Published in | RSC advances Vol. 4; no. 15; pp. 6581 - 6596 |
|---|---|
| Main Authors | , , , , |
| Format | Journal Article |
| Language | English |
| Published |
01.01.2014
|
| Online Access | Get full text |
Cover
Loading…
| Summary: | With ultrasmall particle sizes of ∼1 nm, thiolate-protected silver nanoclusters (or thiolated Ag NCs) have recently emerged as an attractive frontier of nanoparticle research because of their unique molecular-like properties, such as well-defined molecular structures, HOMO-LUMO transitions, quantized charging, and strong luminescence. Such intriguing physicochemical properties have made thiolated Ag NCs a new class of promising theranostic agents for a wide spectrum of biomedical applications, such as bioimaging, antimicrobial agents, and disease diagnostics and therapy. In turn, the promising applications of thiolated Ag NCs have also fuelled the cluster community to develop more efficient strategies to synthesize high-quality Ag NCs with well-defined size, structure, and surface. In this review article, we first survey recent advances in developing efficient synthetic strategies for thiolated Ag NCs, highlighting the underlying chemistry that makes the delicate control of their sizes and surfaces possible. In the second section, we discuss recent advances in characterization techniques for ultrasmall thiolated Ag NCs, including their physical, chemical, and biological properties. The emerging characterization techniques are central to the development of cluster chemistry. In the last section, we highlight some examples demonstrating the vast possibilities of thiolated Ag NCs for biomedical applications. We conclude this review article by pointing out some challenging issues related to thiolated Ag NCs, and hopefully these can encourage more concerted efforts on their study from the research communities of cluster chemistry, noble metal chemistry, biology, biomedicine,
etc.
Recent advances in characterizing ultrasmall thiolated Ag nanoclusters, showing their optical and biological properties, and size, composition, and structure information. |
|---|---|
| Bibliography: | Dr Nirmal Goswami is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Jianping Xie's group at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore. He obtained his PhD (2014) in Chemistry from the S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, India. He is interested in noble metal nanoclusters and their biomedical applications. Dr Jianping Xie received his BS and MS from the Department of Chemical Engineering from Tsinghua University. He graduated with a PhD from the Singapore-MIT Alliance program. He joined National University of Singapore (NUS) as an Assistant Professor in 2010 and established the "Noble Metal Nanoclusters" research group. His major research interest is engineering subnanometer metal nanoclusters for biomedical and catalytic applications. Dr Qingbo Zhang received his BS and MS from Tianjin University of China, and PhD in Chemical Engineering from the National University of Singapore. He is currently a postdoctoral research associate fellow in the Department of Chemistry, Rice University. His research interests include synthesis and surface modification of nanoparticles, exploration of their applications in the fields of healthcare, energy and environmental engineering, and evaluation of their environmental impact. Xun Yuan obtained both his BE (2006) and ME (2009) degrees from Shandong University of Technology, China. He is currently a PhD student at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore (NUS), under the supervision of Prof. Jianping Xie. He focuses his research on the synthesis and biological applications of luminescent metal nanoclusters. Kaiyuan Zheng received her BS degree from Peking University of China. She is currently a PhD student at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore, under the supervision of Prof. Jianping Xie. Her current research interests are the synthesis and biomedical applications of metal nanoclusters. |
| ISSN: | 2046-2069 2046-2069 |
| DOI: | 10.1039/c4ra12054j |