Lanthanide-doped luminescent nanoprobes: controlled synthesis, optical spectroscopy, and bioapplications

Lanthanide-doped inorganic nanoparticles possess superior physicochemical features such as long-lived luminescence, large antenna-generated Stokes or anti-Stokes shifts, narrow emission bands, high resistance to photobleaching and low toxicity, and thus are regarded as a new generation of luminescent bioprobes as compared to conventional molecular probes like organic dyes and lanthanide chelates. These functional nanoparticles, although most of their bulk counterparts were well studied previously, have attracted renewed interest for their biomedical applications in areas as diverse as biodetection, bioimaging, and disease diagnosis and therapeutics. In this review, we provide a comprehensive survey of the…