Bovine Serum Albumin-Conjugated Red Emissive Gold Nanocluster as a Fluorescent Nanoprobe for Super-resolution Microscopy

The gold nanocluster (GNC), because of its interesting photoluminescence properties and easy renal clearance from the body, has tremendous biomedical applications. Unfortunately, it has never been explored for super-resolution microscopy (SRM). Here, we present a protein-conjugated red emissive GNC for super-resolution radial fluctuation (SRRF) of the lysosome in HeLa cells. The diameter of the lysosome obtained in SRRF is similar to 59 nm, which is very close to the original diameter of the smallest lysosome in HeLa cells. Conjugation of protein to GNC aided in the specific labeling of the lysosome. We hope that GNC not only will replace some of the common dyes used in SRM but due to its electron beam contrast could also be used as a multimodal probe for several other correlative bioimaging techniques.