A general functionalization strategy was reported,which enables one to conjugate saccharide（SA） on gold nanoparticle（GNP） surface without affecting SA properties.First,disulfide phenylboronic acid（Bor） functionalized GNPs（Bor@GNPs） were synthesized by the reaction of citrate stabilized GNPs of 13 nm in diameter with the mixture of Bor and pentapeptide（Cys-Ala-Leu-Asn-Asn,CALNN）.Subsequently,the SA-GNP conjugates（SA@GNPs） were prepared by coupling SA to the GNP surface via the reaction of phenylboronic acid（PBA） with the cis-diol configuration in SA.The interactions of three SA@GNPs with three lectins have been analyzed by UV-visible spectroscopic and transmission electronic microscopic（TEM） techniques,respectively.The experimental results demonstrate that SA@GNPs can efficiently bind to lectins and show a great promise as optical probes for monitoring specific affinities of lectins for SA,and detecting lectins with high sensitivity.
Here,we report a new method using combined magnetic resonance(MR)-Photoacoustic(PA)-Thermoacoustic(TA)imaging techmiques,and demonstrate its unique ability for in vrivo cancer detection using tumor-bearing mice.Circular scanning TA and PA imaging systems were used to recover the dielectric and optical property dist ributions of three colon carcinoma bearing mice While a 7.0-T magnetic resonance imaging(MRI)unit with a mouse body volume coil was utilized for high resolution structural imaging of the same mice.Three plastic tubes flled with soybean sauce were used as fiducial markers for the co-registration of MR,PA and TA images.The resulting fused images provided both enhanced tumor margin and contrast relative to the surrounding normal tissues.In particular,some finger-like protrusions extending into the surrounding tissues were revealed in the MR/TA infused images.These results show that the tissue functional optical and dielectric properties provided by PA and TA images along with the anatomical structure by MRI in one picture make accurate tumor identification easier.This combined MR-PA-TA-imaging strategy has the potential to offer a dinically useful triple-modality tool for accurate cancer detection and for intraoper ative surgical navigation.
