Synthetic methodologies to gold nanoshells: An overview

Gold nanostructures that can be synthetically articulated to adapt diverse morphologies, offer a versatile platform and tunable properties for applications in a variety of areas, including biomedicine and diagnostics. Among several conformational architectures, gold nanoshells provide a highly advantageous combination of properties that can be fine-tuned in designing single or multi-purpose nanomaterials, especially for applications in biology. One of the important parameters for evaluating the efficacy of gold nano-architectures is their reproducible synthesis and surface functionalization with desired moieties. A variety of methods now exist that allow fabrication and chemical manipulation of their structure and resulting properties. This review article provides an overview and a discussion of synthetic methodologies to a diverse range of gold nanoshells, and a brief summary of surface functionalization and characterization methods employed to evaluate their overall composition.

Uncontrolled Keywords

Chemical Phenomena; *Chemistry Techniques, Synthetic; Gold/*chemistry; Metal Nanoparticles/chemistry/ultrastructure; Nanoshells/*chemistry/ultrastructure; Particle Size; Spectrum Analysis; Surface Plasmon Resonance; cored gold nanoshells; gold nanoshell synthesis; gold nanoshells; hollow gold nanoshells; template galvanic replacement method