Ultra Bright Lanthanide-Doped Nanoparticles for Luminescence Imaging

Stanford researchers have developed a lanthanide-doped upconverting nanoparticle (UCNP) that emits very photostable and non-blinking light, and is bright enough to delineate tumor boundaries to the naked eye during surgery. These UCNPs have a core-shell-shell structure with highly concentrated sensitizer Yb that increases the luminescence brightness per unit volume. Unlike conventional dyes and quantum dots, these upconverting nanoparticles do not bleach with time and non-blinking. In addition, background-free imaging could be obtained by using these probes. These brighter probes open the possibility of cellular and single-molecule tracking at low irradiance, and even greater comparative sensitivity for cell identification and tracking in live animals.

New Data: Probes have been used to perform single molecule tracking of intracellular cargo traveling on dynein motor protein.