Center for Functional Nanomaterials Seminar

In this talk, I will describe the use of nucleic acids to assemble different types of nanocrystals for theranostic applications. In the first part, I will talk about our work on coupling gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) and gold nanostars (AuNSs) to silica-coated upconverting nanoparticles (UCNPs) and their effect on photoluminescence. The experimental and simulation studies showed that the orientation and distance of the UCNP with respect to the core and arms of the gold nanostructures played a significant role in photoluminescence. Also, the AuNS-UCNP assemblies were able to cause rapid gains in temperature of the surrounding medium enabling their potential use as a multi-therapy agent. Then, photodynamic therapy (PDT) was induced by embedding singlet oxygen photosensitizers in mesoporous silica shells on the UCNPs. It showed the Au-UCNP clusters with optimized plasmon resonance and compositions could provide both in vitro imaging contrast and combined cell killing through simultaneous photothermal (PTT) and photodynamic (PDT) therapy under NIR light photoexcitation. In addition to the Au-UCNP studies, I will also describe our recent efforts on building well-defined core-satellite porphyrinic metal-organic framework (MOF)-UCNP assemblies by DNA templating. In this work, UCNPs were well organized around a centrally located MOF nanoparticles. Under NIR irradiation, the emitted light from the assembled UCNPs excited each core MOF NP to produce singlet oxygen (1O2) at significantly greater amounts than that produced from simply mixing UCNPs and MOF NPs, demonstrating their promise as theranostic photodynamic agents.

In the second part, I will briefly introduce my graduate work in the Ph.D. study on noble metal nanoparticles-MOFs hybrid materials for SERS detecting and multifunctional drug delivery vehicles.