Biosynthesis of biocompatible cadmium telluride quantum dots using yeast cells

By Haifeng Bao, N. Hao, Yunxia Yang, Dongyuan Zhao. 2010

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We demonstrate a simple and efficient biosynthesis method to prepare easily harvested biocompatible cadmium telluride (CdTe) quantum dots (QDs) with tunable fluorescence emission using yeast cells. Ultraviolet-visible (UV-vis) spectroscopy, photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) confirm that the CdTe QDs are formed via an extracellular growth and subsequent endocytosis pathway and have size-tunable optical properties with fluorescence emission from 490 to 560 nm and a cubic zinc blende structure with good crystallinity. In particular, the CdTe QDs with uniform size (2-3.6 nm) are protein-capped, which makes them highly soluble in water, and in situ bio-imaging in yeast cells indicates that the biosynthesized QDs have good biocompatibility. This work provides an economic and environmentally friendly approach to synthesize highly fluorescent biocompatible CdTe QDs for bio-imaging and bio-labeling applications.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f5523c992ade830d042a9523296730ae1be66c93

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