Nano-bio applications using carbon nanotube-biomolecule conjugates

Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNT) exhibit strong Raman signals as well as fluorescence emissions in the near infrared regions where most biomolecules are transparent. Such signals do not blink or photobleach under prolonged excitation, which is advantageous to optical nano-bio marker applications. In this paper, single walled-carbon nanotubes are conjugated with specific types of single-stranded DNA in order to detect oligonucleotides of corresponding complimentary sequences. Dot blotting experiments and comparative Raman spectroscopy observations demonstrated excellent sensitivity and specificity of carbon nanotube-DNA probes. The results show the possibility of using SWNT as generic nano-bio markers for the precise detection of specific kinds of genes.