Abstract
Quantum dots (QDs) are semiconductor nanoparticles with outstanding optoelectronic properties. More specifically, QDs are highly bright and exhibit wide absorption spectra, narrow light bands, and excellent photovoltaic stability, which make them useful in bioscience and medicine, particularly for sensing, optical imaging, cell separation, and diagnosis. In general, QDs are stabilized using a hydrophobic ligand during synthesis, and thus their hydrophobic surfaces must undergo hydrophilic modification if the QDs are to be used in bioapplications. Silica-coating is one of the most effective methods for overcoming the disadvantages of QDs, owing to silica’s physicochemical stability, nontoxicity, and excellent bioavailability. This review highlights recent progress in the design, preparation, and application of silica-coated QDs and presents an overview of the major challenges and prospects of their application.
Highlights
Nanotechnology has made significant contributions to the development of modern society and is currently receiving considerable attention as a result of its potential to break through current stagnation and open up new horizons for technological advancement [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9].Quantum dots (QDs) are one type of nanomaterial that has been studied intensively over the last 30 years, and both significant and continuous advances in their domain have been made since their introduction in the 1980s [10]
QDs are highly suitable for use as optical probes, owing to their low photobleaching, large molar extinction coefficients, high quantum yields (QYs), and long fluorescence lifetimes when compared to conventional organic fluorescent dyes [10]
Template-based multi-QDs (Figure 1c) exhibit substantial potential for bioapplications since the QDs contained in such particles can be positioned in a controlled manner, thereby allowing them to be placed near the particle surface and allowing their brightness to exceed that of silica-coated multi-QDs [35]
Summary
Nanotechnology has made significant contributions to the development of modern society and is currently receiving considerable attention as a result of its potential to break through current stagnation and open up new horizons for technological advancement [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Silica possesses a variety of beneficial characteristics, including facile chemical modification, low cytotoxicity, and excellent chemical stability [24], as well as controllable reactivity, optical transparency, and lack of conductivity. These properties have made silica one of the most widely used elements in nanochemistry, especially for surface modification. Core/shell does not mean that the core and shell are separated physically or inherently separated)
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