A facile and one-pot aqueous phase transfer of oleylamine capped Au NP with aminophenylboronic acid used as transfer and targeting ligand.

Although various phase transfer techniques have been used to make hydrophobic nanoparticles (NPs) water-soluble. However, these techniques have been limited by inefficient surface modification strategy that often stable NPs in aqueous solutions. Herein, we report the use of 3-aminophenylboronic acid (3-APBA) as a hydrophilic ligand for phase transfer of oleylamine (OA) capped Au NPs (OA@Au NPs) from non-hydrolytic system into aqueous solutions. The 3-APBA capped Au NPs (3-APBA@Au NPs) was mainly characterized using different analytical techniques to substantiate the efficiency of the phase transfer procedure. In this simple procedure, 3-APBA molecule was simultaneously used as both phase transfer and targeting ligand for bacteria recognition in one step. In principle, while free electron pair of amin (:NH) group of 3-APBAbind to surface of hydrophobic Au NPs for phase transfer, diol group can bind to glycan on the membrane of Staphylococcus aureus and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) through proper cis-diol configuration. In addition, the resulting 3-APBA@Au NP can effectively catalyze the reduction of 4-nitrophenol (4-NP) to 4-aminophenol (4-AP) in the presence of sodium borohydride (NaBH) in aqueous solution.