The core-shell C dot concept which we originally demonstrated as a fluorescent probe, and has been expanded to include shells capable of environmental sensing can be further expanded to incorporate other functionalities such as drug release and surface plasmon resonance.

Each of these capabilites have been previously demonstrated in silica-based materials, and we propose to integrate them into the modular C dot architecture where different functionalities can be incorporated into different shells to create probes tailored to specific investigations.

Amorphous silica is an excellent host material for a wide variety of functional materials, including fluorescnt dyes, metal nanoparticles and biomolecules. Further, it can be tailored to create architectures unachievable in such functional materials.

One of the goals of our work in silica nanoparticles is the integration of multiple functionalities to create so-called lab-on-a-particle architectures, which would be capable of specific, localized multi-parameter analyses which are not possible using current technologies.