화학공학소재연구정보센터
Journal of the American Chemical Society, Vol.134, No.41, 16971-16974, 2012
Chirality Enriched (12,1) and (11,3) Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes for Biological Imaging
The intrinsic band gap photoluminescence of semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) makes them promising biological imaging probes in the second near-infrared (NIR-II, 1.0-1.4 mu m) window. Thus far, SWNTs used for biological applications have been a complex mixture of metallic and semiconducting species with random chiralities, preventing simultaneous resonant excitation of all semiconducting nanotubes and emission at a single well-defined wavelength. Here, we developed a simple gel filtration method to enrich semiconducting (12,1) and (11,3) SWNTs with identical resonance absorption at similar to 808 nm and emission near similar to 1200 nm. The chirality sorted SWNTs showed similar to 5-fold higher photoluminescence intensity under resonant excitation of 808 nm than unsorted SWNTs on a per-mass basis. Real-time in vivo video imaging of whole mouse body and tumor vessels was achieved using a similar to 6-fold lower injected dose of (12,1) and (11,3) SWNTs (similar to 3 mu g per mouse or similar to 0.16 mg/kg of body weight vs 1.0 mg/kg for unsorted SWNTs) than a previous heterogeneous mixture, demonstrating the first resonantly excited and chirality separated SWNTs for biological imaging.