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Silica nanoparticles have been increasingly used in developing bioanalytical, biomedical and in many other applications. Silica nanoparticles can easily be synthesized and with the advent of wide availability of modified TEOS reactive analogues only the researcher imagination is the limit of preparing silica nanoparticles that contain different molecules that are either copolymerized inside of the silica nanoparticle or chemically attached (bonded) to the silica nanoparticle surface. Relatively non-porous silica nanoparticles can contain copolymerized dyes for the creation of bright fluorescence labels while the surface of these silica nanoparticles can be bonded with reactive moieties that are suitable for covalently labeling the molecule of interest. Also the surface bonded moieties can serve other purposes, e.g., molecular recognition either on a non-fluorescent or fluorescent silica nanoparticle. As far as the fluorescent nanoparticles development concerns near-infrared (NIR) absorbing carbocyanine dyes have been increasingly used as they can be useful for developing bioanalytical, biomedical methods and in many other applications. Carbocyanines are preferred as they are relatively easy to synthesize and can be designed to achieve particular spectroscopic properties. For example either copolymerized or surface bound dyes can contain appropriate functional moieties absorption and fluorescence properties change when it is complexed to metal ions, to detect pH changes, bind to biological molecules, etc. Fluorescence intensity of carbocyanines significantly increases by enclosing several dye molecules in a single silica nanoparticle due to shielding however self quenching may become a problem at high dye concentrations in confined spaces. Large Stokes’ shift dyes can significantly decrease this problem. This can be achieved by substituting meso position halogens in the NIR fluorescent carbocyanines with a linker containing amino moiety which can also serve as linker to covalently attach the dye molecule during the nanoparticle synthesis. This presentation discusses facile synthesis and applications of silica nanoparticles containing copolymerized fluorophores and/or surface bound moieties. Applications include silica nanoparticles containing several dye molecules as bright labels in immunochemical uses, cell imaging and forensic applications for latent blood detection. This latter application was developed using leuco fluorescein copolymerized silica nanoparticles. This synthesis proved that copolymerized dyes can be further modified after the dye containing silica nanoparticle was formed. Surface bound moiety examples will be given for capillary electrochromatography using amino acid-bonded silica nanoparticles as pseudostationary phases as chiral selectors.
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