Dual-Labeled Probes for Fluorescence and Electron Microscopy

Fluorescein and the 1.4 nm Nanogold cluster have been separately attached to polyclonal antibody Fab’ fragments to generate combined fluorescent and gold secondary antibody probes (1, 2), and in comparisons with Nanogold, colloidal gold and fluorescein-labeled secondary antibodies, neither label was found to be significantly compromised by the presence of the other. The proximity to a gold label with which a fluorophore retains sufficient fluorescence emission intensity to be useful is limited by non-radiative fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) (3). This is a function of the degree of overlap of the fluorophore emission spectrum with the metal particle absorbtion spectrum, and of the separation of the metal particle and the fluorophore (4); for an effective dual-labeled probe, separation should be greater than the Forster distance (3), at which 50 % of excited-state decay occurs by FRET.