Facile Fabrication of Metal Nanoparticle/Graphene Oxide Hybrids: A New Strategy To Directly Illuminate Graphene for Optical Imaging

With unique structure and extraordinary properties, graphene has attracted tremendous attention in a wide range of fields recently. In terms of its biomedical applications, graphene has been used to be biosensors and drug carriers, including in vitro and in vivo studies. Therefore, how to clarify the behaviors of graphene in organism is a significant and long-term challenge. For that purpose, fabricating graphene-based materials which can give off some measurable signals become a fascinating topic. In this study, we report a facile noncovalent strategy to fabricate metal nanoparticle/graphene oxide (MNP/GO) hybrids, which can be used to directly illuminate graphene for optical imaging by employing the strong localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) light scattering of MNPs as an effective signal reporter, and thus the profiles of graphene can be observed with a dark-field microscope. The formation of MNP/GO hybrids has been confirmed successfully, and these new nanocomposites assembled from individual building blocks can be promising candidates for the applied purposes of biological imaging, drug delivery, and cancer therapy owing to their collective properties.