CUTRONEO Mariapompea

Development of carbon dots and the exploration of their potential in bioimaging. Due to their excellent properties, the obtained fluorescent CDs represent double-contrast markers that will be studied not only for confocal microscopy, but also in the implementation of correlative light and electron microscopy to match details in multimodal imaging. The research activity is aimed at achieving the following objectives: Objective 1 - Synthesis of carbon dots modulated in size, morphology, and structure, which are important for the controlled modelling of nanoparticles for applications in biomedicine. Objective 2 - Study of the peculiarities of the nanoparticles produced in relation to their interaction with analytes, culture media and the cell environment. analysis of the ability to mark cell organelles. Objective 3 - Study of general strategies for nanoparticle-targeted sub-cellular imaging and in vitro application to normal and tumor cell systems to detect the sensitivity of mitochondria and verify the ability of CDs to discriminate between normal and tumor cells. Objective 4 - Use of CDs as stable double-contrast probes in confocal microscopy-electron microscopy experiments. The proposed approach aims to develop new materials by implementing methods exploited in nanotechnology and reproducing the natural conditions that make carbon dots technologically superior due to their extremely s mall size and richer chemistry.