Biomedical Applications of Anisotropic Gold Nanoparticles

Synthesized colloidal suspensions of gold nanoparticles (GNP) have been around since the early 1950s. Since that time there has been an extremely large body of work dedicated to investigating both the chemical and physical properties of these fascinating materials. This work has by no means been limited to nanospheres, but over the last ~20 years included a wide variety of morphologies including nanorods, nanocubes, nanoshells, and nanocages to name a few. There has been much effort spent on functionalizing these nanomaterials for the purpose of novel nanotechnology-driven approaches to medicinal and biological challenges. Gold nanoparticles continue to be of interest due to their interesting optical properties , sizes, photothermal properties and long-term stability. More recently, there has been a more concerted effort to better understand the growth mechanism of the gold nanoparticles and to discover more efficient and/or greener alternatives for the synthesis of these materials. We cannot begin to provide a truly comprehensive explanation of all of the published work within the gold nanoparticle field in this chapter and so have chosen to outline a few key areas of study.