The currently available techniques for molecular imaging capable of reaching atomic resolution are limited to low temperatures, vacuum conditions, or large amounts of sample. Quantum sensors based on the spin-dependent photoluminescence of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond offer great potential to achieve single-molecule detection with atomic resolution under ambient conditions. Diamond nanoparticles could also be prepared with implanted NV centers, thereby generating unique nanosensors that are able to traffic into living biological systems. Therefore, this technique might provide unprecedented access and insight into the structure and function of individual biomolecules under physiological conditions as well as observation of biological processes down to the quantum level with atomic resolution. However, nanodiamonds without coating would serious aggregating in biological environment. Therefore, a biopolymer-coating strategy has been developed using a PEG hybrid polymer derived from native albumin. NDs coated by these biopolymers are found to be highly stable in all tested biological buffers and also over a broad pH range (pH 2–8) without any aggregation. In addition, this protein-derived biopolymer provides high numbers of orthogonal functional groups from the amino acid residues, which allows easy post-modification of biomolecules. We are further developing this coated NDs as multifunctional bioprobes for non-invasive quantum sensing and hyperpolarized magnetic resonance imaging.
Representative publications:
1. Weina Liu, Boris Naydenov, Sabyasachi Chakrabortty, Bettina Wuensch, Kristina Hübner, Sandra Ritz, Helmut Cölfen, Holger Barth, Kaloian Koynov, Haoyuan Qi, Robert Leiter, Rolf Reuter, Jörg Wrachtrup, Felix Boldt, Jonas Scheuer, Ute Kaiser, Miguel Sison, Theo Lasser, Philip Tinnefeld, Fedor Jelezko, Paul Walther, Yuzhou Wu*, Tanja Weil*, Fluorescent Nanodiamond–Gold Hybrid Particles for Multimodal Optical and Electron Microscopy Cellular Imaging, Nano Lett., 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b02456
2. Yuzhou Wu*, Fedor Jelezko, Martin Plenio, Tanja Weil*, Diamond Quantum Devices in Biology, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2016, 55, 6586-6598.
3. Yuzhou Wu*, Anna Ermakova, Weina Liu, Goutam Pramanik, Minh Vu, Andrea Kurz, Liam McGuinness, Boris Naydenov, Susanne Hafner, Rolf Reuter, Joerg Wrachtrup, Dominique Böcking, Junichi Isoya, Thomas Simmet, Fedor Jelezko*, Tanja Weil*, Programmable Biopolymers for Advancing Biomedical Applications of Fluorescent Nanodiamonds, Adv. Funct. Mater., 2015, 25, 6576–6585.
