Abstract
This work reports the preparation of water-soluble leucine capped gold nanoparticles by two single-step synthesis methods. The first procedure involves a citrate reduction approach where the citrate is used as reducing agent and leucine as capping/stabilizing agent. Different sizes of gold nanoparticles, citrate reduced and stabilized by leucine, Leu-AuNPs-C, with the mean diameters in the range of 21–56 nm, were obtained by varying the macroscopic parameters such as: concentration of the gold precursor solution, Au (III):citrate molar ratio and leucine pH. In the second procedure, leucine acts both as reducing and stabilizing agent, allowing us to obtain spherical gold nanoparticles, Leu-AuNPs, with a majority of 80 % (with the mean diameter of 63 nm). This proves that leucine is an appropriate reductant for the formation of water-soluble and stable gold nanoparticles colloids. The characterization of the leucine coated gold nanoparticles was carried out by TEM, UV–Vis and FT-IR analysis. The cytotoxic effect of Leu-AuNPs-C and Leu-AuNPs was also evaluated.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by CNCSIS-UEFISCSU, PN II-RU-PD 585/2010. C. Berghian-Grosan gratefully acknowledges for financial support.
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Berghian-Grosan, C., Olenic, L., Katona, G. et al. l-Leucine for gold nanoparticles synthesis and their cytotoxic effects evaluation. Amino Acids 46, 2545–2552 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00726-014-1814-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00726-014-1814-z