Doctoral Candidate, Single quantum dot imaging, fabrication of a quantum-dot based FRET system.
Ornstein Lab. 119
tel: +31 30 253 2286

c.xia@uu.nl

Chenghui has started his combined master’s and doctoral studies at the 中国海洋大学 (Ocean University of China) in Qingdao in 2013. In 2014, he was awarded a scholarship by the China Scholarship Council (CSC)  and now pursues a doctoral degree at Utrecht University under the supervision of Profs. Hans Gerritsen, Andries Meijerink and Celso de Mello Donegá.

Research :

Dark quenchers, namely non-fluorescent dyes, have been commonly applied in Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) based fluorogenic probes for protease activity detection, nucleic acid hybridization and real-time polymerase chain reaction. In FRET-based systems, a specific quencher is normally able to quench the fluorescence only from those fluorophore donors that have significant overlap of their emission spectra with the absorption spectrum of the quencher, and when the donor and quencher are brought into close proximity (much less than 10 nm).

In my project, we will fabricate a FRET system using CuInS₂/ZnS QDs as donor, while a dark dye as an acceptor efficiently quenches fluorescence from a wide range of donors, spanning from 500 to 800 nm emission. High quality water-soluble CuInS₂/ZnS QDs, with photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) around 30%, were obtained via ligand exchange. Furthermore, the emission spectra of these water-soluble QDs can be tuned by controlling the size of their cores. By tuning the PLQY of donor and the degree of spectral overlap between the donor emission and the acceptor absorption, different Förster distance (R₀) and efficiency of energy transfer (E) can be obtained. These optimized results will contribute to the further investigation on the lipo-protein biointeractions via FRET.

Publications