Carbon Dots Doped with Dysprosium: A Bimodal Nanoprobe for MRI and Fluorescence Imaging

Timur Sh Atabaev; Zhonglie Piao; Anara Molkenova

doi:10.3390/jfb9020035

Carbon Dots Doped with Dysprosium: A Bimodal Nanoprobe for MRI and Fluorescence Imaging

J Funct Biomater. 2018 May 18;9(2):35. doi: 10.3390/jfb9020035.

Authors

Timur Sh Atabaev¹, Zhonglie Piao², Anara Molkenova³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, School of Science and Technology, Nazarbayev University, Astana 010000, Kazakhstan. timur.atabaev@nu.edu.kz.
² Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114, USA. zpiao@mgh.harvard.edu.
³ Department of Chemistry, School of Science and Technology, Nazarbayev University, Astana 010000, Kazakhstan. anara.molkenova@nu.edu.kz.

Abstract

In recent years, functional nanoprobes with multiple imaging modalities have become an emerging field of biomedical research. In this preliminary study, we utilized a facile hydrothermal method for the preparation of magneto-fluorescent bimodal carbon dots doped with dysprosium (Dy-CDs). The prepared Dy-CDs have shown a good colloidal stability in a water solution and strong blue⁻green fluorescence, with a maximum at 452 nm. In addition, the excellent transverse relaxivity of the prepared Dy-CDs (r₂ = 7.42 ± 0.07 mM^-1s^-1) makes them also suitable for T₂-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Thus, synthesized Dy-CDs could be potentially utilized for both MRI and fluorescence imaging of living cells.

Keywords: bimodal nanoprobes; carbon dots; dysprosium; fluorescence; magnetic resonance imaging MRI.