Nanodiamond Landmarks for Subcellular Multimodal Optical and Electron Imaging

There is a growing need for biolabels that can be used in both optical and electron microscopies, are non-cytotoxic and do not photobleach. Such biolabels could enable targeted nanoscale imaging of sub-cellular structures and help to establish correlations between conjugation-delivered biomolecules...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inScientific reports Vol. 3; no. 1; p. 2668
Main Authors Zurbuchen, Mark A., Lake, Michael P., Kohan, Sirus A., Leung, Belinda, Bouchard, Louis-S.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Nature Publishing Group UK 16.09.2013
Nature Publishing Group
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Summary:There is a growing need for biolabels that can be used in both optical and electron microscopies, are non-cytotoxic and do not photobleach. Such biolabels could enable targeted nanoscale imaging of sub-cellular structures and help to establish correlations between conjugation-delivered biomolecules and function. Here we demonstrate a sub-cellular multi-modal imaging methodology that enables localization of inert particulate probes, consisting of nanodiamonds having fluorescent nitrogen-vacancy centers. These are functionalized to target specific structures and are observable by both optical and electron microscopies. Nanodiamonds targeted to the nuclear pore complex are rapidly localized in electron-microscopy diffraction mode to enable “zooming-in” to regions of interest for detailed structural investigations. Optical microscopies reveal nanodiamonds for in-vitro tracking or uptake-confirmation. The approach is general, works down to the single nanodiamond level and can leverage the unique capabilities of nanodiamonds, such as biocompatibility, sensitive magnetometry and gene and drug delivery.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/srep02668