One year Post-doctoral position open in lanthanide physical-inorganic chemistry at the CEA-Grenoble , France (group of Marinella Mazzanti)

A post-doctoral position is open in the group of Marinella Mazzanti with possible starting dates February-Avril 2010. The candidate should be familiar with lanthanide chemistry or have a strong background in physical coordination chemistry. He should be at ease with the main spectroscopic tools (such as solution NMR spectroscopy, UV-visible spectroscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy and potentiometry). This project aims to develop new nanosized optical and bimodal optical/magnetic probes for application in biological labelling and imaging. This will involve the grafting of luminescent lanthanide chelates developed in our laboratory on nanocrystals and the study of the photophysical and relaxivity properties of the resulting probes. Cadmium selenide nanocrystals (quantum dots, QDs) developed in the CEA-Grenoble show efficient photoluminescence with size dependent emission energy, high absorption efficiency and good luminescence quantum yields. In addition, the surface of these nanocrystals can be easily functionalized to enable the grafting of different molecules or to allow solubilisation in various solvent. In this project the spacers of the gadolinium chelates are carefully designed to improve reproducibility and to allow easy modulation of Ln-QD distances. A suitable rigid grafting should result in very high relaxivity of the final gadolinium nanoparticules. Therefore, the anchoring of gadolinium chelates to nanocrystals should result in bimodal luminescent and magnetic probes, and should lead to high relaxivity contrast agents.

References

1. Nonat, A.; Fries, P. H.; Pécaut, J.; Mazzanti, M. Chem. Eur. J. 2007, 13, 8489-8506.
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