Preparation And Application Of Functional Nanomaterial Ligands

Recently, nanomaterials have become the foundation of many subjects. Due to their small size effect, surface effect and macroscopic quantum tunnel effect, nanomaterials dispaly wide applications in optics, electronics, and magnetics, and have turned into "hot-spot" in recent years.In this thesis, we have synthesized several kinds of amphiphilic polymers as the surface protection reagent. Under the help of nano-coprecipitation strategies, we have developed a general method for the fabrication of water-soluble fluorescent semiconducting polymer nanoprobes (SPNs). The comprehensive spectroscopic and microscopic characterizations illustrate that the SPNs possess superior photo-physical performances such as excellent fluorescence intensity, reduced photo-blinking in contrast to quantum dots, as well as good photo-stability over similar size fluorescent proteins. More importantly, by conjugating membrane biomarkers onto the surface of SPNs, it was found that they are not only applicable for specific cellular labeling but also suitable for single particle tracking due to the improved optical performances.These studies have been performed as follows:1. The fabrication route for fluorescent polymer nanoparticles was optimized and small size fluorescent nanoparticles was successfully synthesized. Firstly, different types of amphiphilic polymers ligands were synthesized. Secondly, by utilizing amphiphilic polymer as the surface protection reagent and Poly[(9,9-dioctylfluorenyl-2,7-diyl)-alt-co-(1,4-benzo-{2,1’,3}-thiadiazole)](PFBT) as precursor materials, under the help of nano-coprecipitation strategy, water-soluble and fluorescent semiconducting conjugated polymer nanoprobes were fabricated. The comprehensive spectroscopic and microscopic characterizations showed that the nanoparticles reported here exhibited excellent characters, such as small size, homogeneous size distribution, bright fluorescence intensity, high fluorescence quantum yield and so on.2. This section is devoted to the analysis of the optical properties and the fluorescent stabilities of the as-synthesized semiconductor polymer nanoparticles. We further characterized the effect of cysteamine on the optical performance of the polymer nanoparticle at single particle level.3. We applied these fluorescent probes in tumor cell targeting and single particle tracking in living cells.