Highlights

Investigation of Peptide-Gold Interfaces for Delivery of Nanoparticles in Vivo

Scientific Achievement

The goal of our work was to use the EMC to characterize gold-silica nanoshells synthesized in our lab that would be used in future peptide binding studies.  The main scientific achievement from our work at the EMC was the successful synthesis of gold-silica nanoshells and the characterization of silica-coated iron oxide nanoparticles.  The silica-coated iron oxide particles were unsuccessfully used to synthesize magnetic nanoshells.

Significance

The significance of our characterization studies was to improve our synthetic method for creating gold-silica nanoshells with improved shell coverages and greater monodispersity.  These particles were used in subsequent studies as surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) detection of peptide binding to gold surfaces.  We have followed up on this work with further analysis of the peptide gold interface with more in-depth SERS studies.  This work will allow for the development of bifunctional peptides for the delivery of nanoshells to cancerous tumors.  This work has been published in Plasmonics 2 (3), 119-127 (2007).  Our work with the silica-coated iron oxide particles prompted further work into the use of cobalt nanoparticles for nanoshell cores which is ongoing. 

Performers

S. W. Bishnoi, Y. J. Lin (Illinois Institute of Technology)