Nanotech News

February 28, 2005

Virus Particles Networked with Quantum Dots, Nanotubes

Linking engineered virus particles to inorganic quantum dots or carbon nanotubes, a research team from the University of California, Riverside, and the Scripps Research Institute have crafted stable nanoscale networks. Researchers may find use for such hybrid organic-inorganic networks in developing targeted delivery of drugs or diagnostic agents, as well as in constructing novel materials and densely packed nanoelectronic sensing devices.

The California-based research team, headed by Mihrimah Ozkan, Ph.D., at UC-Riverside, and Marianne Manchester, Ph.D., and Anette Schneemann, Ph.D., at Scripps, developed a series of chemical techniques for linking single-walled carbon nanotubes to a mutant insect virus known as flock house virus and for hooking plant cowpea mosaic virus to cadmium selenide quantum dots. These chemical methods are versatile enough to enable the researchers to create networks of various sizes and shapes. Future work with these networks will explore their properties and the uses they may have in creating devices valuable for biomedical applications.

This work, supported in part by the National Cancer Institute, has been published in the online edition of the journal Langmuir and is slated for print publication. An abstract of the paper, "Organic and Inorganic Nanoparticle Hybrids," is available.
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