Skip to main content
. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2015 Dec 1.
Published in final edited form as: Part Part Syst Charact. 2014 Nov 10;31(12):1291–1299. doi: 10.1002/ppsc.201400184

Figure 2.

Figure 2

Characterization of polymer-encapsulated QDots. (a) Polymer encapsulation successfully preserved QDot optical properties, yielding consistent light absorbance (solid blue and red lines) and fluorescence emission (dotted blue and red lines) profiles between stock QDots in chloroform and polymer-encapsulated QDots in an aqueous buffer, respectively. Normalized absorbance and emission profiles are shown. (b) Stock hydrophobic QDots analyzed by TEM featured an average core diameter of 5–6 nm, which matched well the native PMAT micelle size in an aqueous buffer of about 5.5 nm measured by DLS (c, red curve). Interestingly, PMAT dissolved in chloroform failed to produce consistent DLS measurements (c, blue curve), likely due to lack of stable micelle formation in a non-polar solvent. (d) DLS analysis of polymer-encapsulated QDots confirmed good particle stability in an aqueous buffer and lack of aggregates, measuring a hydrodynamic size of PMAT-coated QDots of about 13.3 nm (solid line) and cross-linked PMAT-coated QDots of about 15.3 nm (dotted line).