High Yield and Inexpensive Production of Quality Gold Nanocrystals for Bio-Labels

描述(申请人提供)：该SBIR计划旨在开发一组新技术，用于大规模和廉价地生产基于金纳米晶体(GoldTagsTM)的生物标签。金纳米晶体，通常被称为胶体金，多年来一直被广泛探索用于生物标记，是唯一一种在现代社会的日常生活中产生明显影响的纳米晶体--基于超市中可买到的金纳米晶体的试剂盒。与半导体纳米晶体标签相比，金色标签无毒、对环境无害，并且具有高消光系数--对于比色应用来说是明亮的。然而，高质量纳米金的大规模生产一直是一个瓶颈。目前生产Au纳米晶的先进技术存在生产率低、成本高、难以制备相对较小尺寸的纳米晶、粒度范围和粒度分布差、生物相容性差等问题。这项正在申请专利的技术具有高质量的金纳米晶体的产量，与标准的柠檬酸还原方法相比，产量约为1000倍。这种独特的方法大大优于Brust方法，其纳米晶的尺寸范围、尺寸分布和表面可访问性都很好。该项目还将通过NN-Labs和我们的分包商共同发明的一种新方案-树枝状纳米晶和盒纳米晶-解决Au纳米晶作为生物标记的另一个关键挑战。该SBIR计划的总体技术目标是将成功的高质量金纳米晶体的实验室合成方法扩展到商业规模，并将这些高质量纳米晶体转化为生物就绪的GoldTagTM。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This SBIR program intends to develop a group of new technologies for the large scale and inexpensive production of bio-labels based on gold nanocrystals (GoldTagsTM). Gold nanocrystals, usually known as colloidal gold, have been widely explored for bio-labeling for many years and are the only type of nanocrystaMabels making a visible impact in daily life for modem society-pregnancy test kits based on gold nanocrystals available in supermarkets. In comparison to semiconductor nanocrystals labels, gold ones are nontoxic, environmentally benign, and exhibit high extinction coefficients-bright for colormetric applications. However, the production of high quality gold nanocrystals on a large scale has been a bottle-neck. The current art-in-state technologies to produce Au nanocrystals are low productivity, high cost, difficult to make relatively small size nanocrystals, poor size range and size distribution, and difficult to make them biocompatible. The patent-pending technology has a high yield of high quality gold nanocrystals, about 1000 times in comparison to the standard citrate-reduction method. Substantially better than the Brust method, the size range, size distribution, and the surface accessibility of the nanocrystals from this unique method are all excellent. This project will also solve another key challenge for Au nanocrystals as bio-labels by a new scheme-dendron-nanocrystals and box-nanocrystals-jointly invented by NN-Labs and our subcontractor. The overall technical objective of this SBIR program is to extend a successful laboratory synthetic method for high quality gold nanocrystals to commercial scale and convert these high quality nanocrystals to bio-ready GoldTagTM.