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DNA's new colours

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 2, page 567 (2001)Cite this article

QDs work like any other fluorophore — they absorb light and re-emit it at a different wavelength. However, QDs are unique because the colour emitted by each QD depends on its size, so QDs of any emission spectrum (that is, any colour) can be generated simply by varying the size of the QD particle. In addition, the QDs — brighter than conventional fluorophores — are resistant to photobleaching, and QDs of different colours can be excited by the light of a single wavelength. Furthermore, unlike ordinary fluorophores, the emission spectra of individual QDs are very narrow, so QDs of different sizes can be used in combination by embedding them in polymer beads at precisely controlled ratios — effectively forming a bar-coded ID. As each colour can be manipulated to have different emission intensities, the number of different bar-coded beads that can be generated increases exponentially into the tens of thousands.

So what are the biological applications for these nifty new beads? Uniquely identifiable QD beads can be conjugated onto oligonucleotide probes or antibodies, opening new roads for medical diagnostics, drug screening and gene expression studies. DNA chip experiments could be run more cheaply, effectively and quickly if the DNA probes were individually coded by beads that, as Nie and co-workers show, can be identified with an accuracy of 99.99%. 'Rainbow' DNA chips might not be long in coming.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Han, M. et al. Quantum-dot-tagged microbeads for multiplexed optical coding of biomolecules. Nature Biotechnol. 19, 631–635 (2001)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Rosenthal, S. J. Bar-coding molecules with fluorescent nanocrystals. Nature Biotechnol. 19, 621–622 (2001)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

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Authors
  1. Tanita Casci
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Shuming Nie's lab

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Casci, T. DNA's new colours. Nat Rev Genet 2, 567 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35084536

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