Unambiguous and Controlled One-Pot Synthesis of Multifunctional Silica Nanoparticles

Existing strategies for the synthesis of functional silica nanoparticles (SiNPs) rely on surface modifications followed by grafting of the organic moiety via chemoselective chemistry. Under these conditions, the introduction of several elements (e.g., ligands, drugs, fluorophores, vectors, etc.) on the same particle in a desired ratio and density is particularly difficult to achieve. We developed a method for obtaining in a single step well-defined tunable multifunctional fluorescent particles, presenting at their surface multiple ligands, covalently linked to their surface. Our strategy relies on the synthesis of hybrid bioorganic–inorganic peptide ligands, greatly simplifying the design of multifunctional nanoparticles. We demonstrated that it was possible to tune the ratio of two grafted ligands on the surface of the SiNPs simply by adjusting the relative concentration of hybrid species in the starting solution. An original fluorine nuclear magnetic resonance method was applied to the dissolved SiNPs to demonstrate our hypothesis.