Synthesis, Surface Modification, and Characterization of Metal Oxide Nanoparticles Nanoprobes for Signal Enhancement in Biomedical Imaging

Sammanfattning: In this thesis we investigate crystalline metal oxide nanoparticles of our own design to obtain nanoprobes for signal enhancement and bioimaging purposes. We report fabrication, surface modification and characterization of nanoparticles based on zinc (Zn), and rare earths (i.e. gadolinium (Gd) and europium (Eu)) singly and in combination. Our ZnO nanoparticles show high potential as fluorescent probes and Gd2O3 nanoparticles are promising as nanoprobes for MR signal enhancement. A combined Zn, Gd material is investigated as a potential dual probe. Interestingly, this nanoprobe shows, compared to the pure oxides, both increased fluorescent quantum yield and do induce improved relaxivity and by that enhanced MR signal. Nanoparticles composed of Eu doped Gd2O3 are also investigated in terms of their ability to interact with silicon surfaces. The presence of nanoparticles shows a catalytic effect on the annealing procedure of SiOx.Surface modification of Gd and Zn based nanoparticles is performed, in a first step to improve stabilization of the nanoparticle core. Both carboxylic acids (paper I) and a thiol terminated silane (paper II and III) are used for this purpose. In a second step, a polyethylene glycol (PEG) is used for surface modification, to increase the biocompatibility of the nanoparticles. The Mal PEG NHS is chemically linked to thiol terminated silane groups via a maleimide coupling (Paper II). The presence of free NHS functional groups is intended to enable further linking of specific molecules for targeting purposes. The fluorescent dye rhodamine was, as a proof of concept, linked via the NHS functional group to the PEGylated Gd2O3 nanoparticles (Paper II). In Paper III, an alternative linking strategy is investigated, using iodized PEG2-Biotin for coupling via the iodide unit to the thiol terminated silane on ZnO nanoparticles. The resulting surface modified nanoparticles are investigated by means of coordination chemistry and coupling efficiency using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, near edge X-ray absorption fine structure  spectroscopy and infrared spectroscopy.