Monitoring chemically enhanced transdermal delivery pathways of luminescent quantum dots by multiphoton microscopy

Luminescent quantum dots (QDs) are attractive fluorescent probes in bioimaging application. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of administering QDs (7 nm in size) through transdermal delivery pathway using multiphoton fluorescence imaging. Our results show that QDs of this size range can be effectively delivered through intercellular pathways using the chemical enhancer oleic acid. This work has implications for understanding the transport of important biological macromolecules. Our results suggest that QDs can be noninvasively delivered for biological imaging and for probing the transport of nanometer-scale material in tissue. These results also imply that the size of nanoparticles may dominate the nature of transdermal transport mechanism.