Faithful Fabrication of Biocompatible Multicompartmental Memomicrospheres for Digitally Color‐Tunable Barcoding

Abstract

Barcodes have attracted widespread attention, especially for the multiplexed bioassays and anti‐counterfeiting used toward medical and biomedical applications. An enabling gas‐shearing approach is presented for generating 10‐faced microspherical barcodes with precise control over the properties of each compartment. As such, the color of each compartment could be programmatically adjusted in the 10‐faced memomicrospheres by using pregel solutions containing different combinations of fluorescent nanoparticles. During the process, three primary colors (red, green, and blue) are adopted to obtain up to seven merged fluorescent colors for constituting a large amount of coding as well as a magnetic compartment, capable of effective and robust high‐throughput information‐storage. More importantly, by using the biocompatible sodium alginate to construct the multicolor microspherical barcodes, the proposed technology is likely to advance the fields of food and pharmaceutics anti‐counterfeiting. These remarkable properties point to the potential value of gas‐shearing in engineering microspherical barcodes for biomedical applications in the future.

Magnetic Nanowires toward Authentication

“…Second, implementing more advanced decoding algorithms based on machine learning approaches. Third, the simplicity of encoding and decoding the MNWs using the BRM spectra can be integrated with optical nanoparticles, such as memomicrospheres, [ 11 ] to drastically expand the number of barcodes for food and biomedical applications, such as labeling cancer‐derived exosomes. [ 29,34 ] Therefore, we anticipate this finding will be a cornerstone for high‐level security performance anti‐counterfeiting strategies in the future.…”

“…Nanobarcodes are becoming increasingly important in a variety of applications; including molecular diagnostics, [ 1–3 ] biological labeling, [ 4–7 ] personnel and materials tracking, [ 8 ] authentication and brand protection in anti‐counterfeiting, [ 9–12 ] as well as cryptography and computing. [ 13–17 ] Nanostructures are highly desired building blocks in these applications, particularly authentication, because their similar appearance makes the identification and verification impossible by naked eyes even though their chemical and physical properties are substantially different.…”

“…For example, it has been shown that magnetic and optical signatures of the nanostructures could be engineered by tuning their shape/size and/or compositions in addition to conjugating the magnetic and optical nanoparticles to provide several distinguishable nanobarcodes. [ 10–12,19–21 ] Even though these nanobarcodes present distinct codes while being measured individually, decoding unknown combinations of their codes is still elusive. It should be emphasized that this problem is not limited only to magnetic or optical nanobarcodes because other nanobarcodes, such as radio‐frequency identification and morphological‐based nanobarcodes, also suffer from decoding limitations.…”

Preparation of Single, Heteromorphic Microspheres, and Their Progress for Medical Applications

“…Great breakthroughs have been made in the preparation of microspheres, especially in the field of multicompartmental microspheres (Figure 7B). [ 3,67 ]…”

“…Explosive progress has been made in such fields as diagnosis and drug anticounterfeiting, etc. ( Figure ) [ 2,3 ] based on microspheres. The rich morphology of microspheres is the main reason why they can make great progress in the medical field.…”