Fluorescent nanoparticles for sensing

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in nanoparticle-based fluorescent sensors, highlighting their design, types, mechanisms, and applications in chemical and biological detection, emphasizing new organic and metal nanoclusters.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent developments, comparing various nanoparticle types, synthesis methods, and their sensing capabilities in biological and chemical contexts.

Findings

Organic nanoparticles like carbon dots are biocompatible and easy to synthesize.

Metal nanoclusters such as gold and silver are less cytotoxic alternatives.

Nanoparticle sensors offer versatile and sensitive detection methods.

Abstract

Nanoparticle-based fluorescent sensors have emerged as a competitive alternative to small molecule sensors, due to their excellent fluorescence-based sensing capabilities. The tailorability of design, architecture, and photophysical properties has attracted the attention of many research groups, resulting in numerous reports related to novel nanosensors applied in sensing a vast variety of biological analytes. Although semiconducting quantum dots have been the best-known representative of fluorescent nanoparticles for a long time, the increasing popularity of new classes of organic nanoparticle-based sensors, such as carbon dots and polymeric nanoparticles, is due to their biocompatibility, ease of synthesis, and biofunctionalization capabilities. For instance, fluorescent gold and silver nanoclusters have emerged as a less cytotoxic replacement for semiconducting quantum dot sensors. This chapter provides an overview of recent developments in nanoparticle-based sensors for chemical and biological sensing and includes a discussion on unique properties of nanoparticles of different composition, along with their basic mechanism of fluorescence, route of synthesis, and their advantages and limitations.