%0 Journal Article
%T Inorganic phosphate nanorods are a novel fluorescent label in cell biology
%A Chitta Patra
%A Resham Bhattacharya
%A Sujata Patra
%A Sujit Basu
%A Priyabrata Mukherjee
%A Debabrata Mukhopadhyay
%J Journal of Nanobiotechnology
%D 2006
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1477-3155-4-11
%X Nanotechnology, the creation of new objects in nanoscale dimensions, is a cutting edge technology having important applications in modern biomedical research [1-7]. Because the dimension of nanoscale devices is similar to cellular components such as DNA and proteins [8,9], tools developed through nanotechnology may be utilized to detect or monitor several diseases at the molecular level [3,10,11]. Bio-imaging with inorganic fluorescent nanorods probes have recently attracted widespread interest in biology and medicine [1-4,12-14] compared to nanospheres. According to the reported literature [15], there is a drastic reduction of the plasmon dephasing rate in nanorods compared to small nanospheres due to a suppression of interband damping [15]. These rods show very little radiation damping due to their small volumes. These findings imply large local-field enhancement factors and relatively high light-scattering efficiencies, making metal nanorods extremely interesting for optical applications. Therefore, we are highly interested to examine the possibility of using inorganic fluorescent nanorods, especially lanthanide ortho phosphate LnPO4¡¤H2O [Ln = Eu or Tb], as fluorescent labels in cell biology. On the otherhand, in comparison to organic dyes (including Fluorescein, Texas Red£¿, Lissamine Rhodamine B, and Tetramethylrhodamine) and fluorescent proteins (Green fluorescent protein, GFP), inorganic fluorescent nanoparticles have several unique optical and electronic properties including size- and composition-tunable emission from visible to infrared wavelengths, a large stokes shift, symmetric emission spectrum, large absorption coefficients across a wide spectral range, simultaneous excitation of multiple fluorescent colors, very high levels of brightness, [4,13], high resistance to photobleaching, and an exceptional resistance to photo- and chemical degradation [2-5,13,16,17] ].Bio-conjugated inorganic nanoparticles have raised new possibilities for the ultrasensitive
%U http://www.jnanobiotechnology.com/content/4/1/11