Labelling nanoparticles by nanotracers and oligonucleotides

The rapidly developing field of nanotechnologies presents many opportunities and benefits for new materials with significantly improved properties as well as revolutionary applications in the fields of materials, energy, environment, medicine, etc. Nevertheless, this new industry can rapidly compete with microelectronics or automotive in terms of annual turnover only if the nanoproducts are well accepted by consumers. Labelling the nanoproducts as nanomaterials is one of the prerequisite conditions for market acceptance. One approach consists in encouraging manufacturers to insert labels since the nanoparticles synthesis, at the last step of the production reactors, in order to give consumers useful information related to nano-fillers contained in commercial products. The first level of information could be the specification of the presence of nanoparticles in the product: a kind of tag indicating nanomaterials inside. The second level of labelling could supply more complex information such as: the type of nanoparticles, the manufacturer name, the batch number, the toxicity class, etc. In European Nanosafe2 project, two main routes have been investigated: the previous one is using biomarkers based tracers. In that case the information is available thanks to conventional biological methods. The second way requests fluorescent nanotracers which are less powerful in terms of data storage but may be more resistant against chemicals, temperature, UV aggressions and could be red in a few seconds by field operational portable decoding devices. For economical reasons it is necessary to introduce a very small quantity of tracers in the nanoparticles. Nevertheless, for certain applications for which a high purity level of the nanoparticles is requested (e.g. microelectronics) this small amount can be redhibitory.