A synthetic strategy of quantum dot-bioconjugate

Quantum dots (QDs) have attracted tremendous interest in biological applications, such as bioimaging, biolabeling, and biosensing, because of their advantages over organic fluorophores at high quantum yield (QY), size-tunable narrow emission, photostability, etc. To date, various strategies have been developed to obtain water-soluble QDs and QD bioconjugates, but these commonly require multiple steps to obtain the final products. Herein, we present a simple and robust one-step method for creating stable, water-soluble QD and QD-biomolecule conjugates. We demonstrate the successful implementation of this strategy by using mercaptopropyl acid and DNA molecules as model systems, but expect this could also be extended to other types of biomolecules.