Pluronic-Silica (PluS) Nanoparticles Doped with Multiple Dyes Featuring Complete Energy Transfer

Abstract

We report here the design of two sets of multifluorophoric silica nanoparticles, observing unprecedented efficiencies in the energy-transfer processes among the doping dyes. These nanomaterials show a very high overall sensitization, allowing under a single wavelength excitation to obtain many different colors (one per nanoparticle) in emission with negligible crosstalk. Moreover, each particle can present very large and tunable pseudo-Stokes shifts (up to 435 nm), a very high brightness even exciting the bluest donor, and a negligible residual emission intensity from all donor dyes. All these features, combined with colloidal stability and synthetic method reliability, make these multicomponent nanoparticles very promising for multiplex analysis and for all the diagnostic techniques requiring high sensitivity associated with a large Stokes shift.