Study on Nanoparticle Sizing Using Fluorescent Polarization Method with DNA Fluorescent Probe

Abstract

Fluorescent polarization methods are used to detect complementary base pairing of DNA in biological fields. These methods work by measuring the rotational diffusion coefficient of Brownian motion of the fluorescent particles in solution. The rotational diffusion coefficient corresponds to the inverse third power of diameter according to the Debye-Stokes-Einstein equation for nanoparticles as hard spheres. We develop a novel method to measure the rotational diffusion coefficient using a fluorescent probe with a DNA spacer connected to a gold nanoparticle. We studied the physical characteristics of this probe to verify the feasibility of the proposed method. The rotational diffusion coefficients of gold nanoparticles with diameters ranging between 5–20 nm were measured using this developed system. In this manuscript we describe a novel fluorescent polarization method for nanoparticle sizing using a fluorescent DNA probe.