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

描述（由申请人提供）：该SBIR计划旨在开发一组新技术，用于大规模和廉价生产基于金纳米晶体（GoldTagsTM）的生物标记。金纳米晶体，通常称为胶体金，多年来一直被广泛探索用于生物标记，并且是唯一一种对现代社会日常生活产生明显影响的纳米晶体-基于金纳米晶体的怀孕测试试剂盒超市中有售。与半导体纳米晶体标签相比，金纳米晶体标签无毒，对环境友好，并且具有高消光系数，对于比色应用来说是明亮的。然而，大规模生产高质量的金纳米晶一直是一个瓶颈。目前生产Au纳米晶体的现有技术生产率低，成本高，难以制备相对小尺寸的纳米晶体，尺寸范围和尺寸分布差，并且难以使它们具有生物相容性。这项正在申请专利的技术具有高质量金纳米晶体的高产率，约为标准柠檬酸盐还原法的1000倍。与Brust方法相比，这种独特方法制备的纳米晶体的尺寸范围、尺寸分布和表面可及性都非常出色。该项目还将解决Au纳米晶体作为生物标记物的另一个关键挑战，这是由NN实验室和我们的分包商共同发明的一种新方案--树枝状纳米晶体和盒状纳米晶体。该SBIR计划的总体技术目标是将高质量金纳米晶体的成功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.