Biomacromolecular fluorescent nanoparticles co-assembled by bovine serum albumin and DNA segments for living cell imaging

Fluorescent nanoparticles have been widely used in the field of biomedical engineering because they are usually biocompatible, cost-effective and homogeneously uniform. In this study, we describe a biomacromolecular fluorescent nanoparticle prepared with a facile disolvating process using bovine serum albumin, DNA segments and SYBR Green I. The obtained co-assemblies, termed [email protected] nanoparticles, had a narrow and relatively uniform size distribution with an average size of about 122 nm and the PDI value 0.087. Cellular uptake results demonstrated well internalization of [email protected] nanoparticles by the Michigan Cancer Foundation-7 (MCF-7) cells. Together with the fluorescent tag of SYBR Green I molecules, [email protected] nanoparticles accumulated in the cell cytoplasm after cellular internalization enabled the MCF-7 cells for fluorescent imaging. This study provided a new strategy for constructing biomacromolecular fluorescent nanoparticles for applications in biomedical engineering and biomedical imaging.