The influence of the reducing agent used during the synthesis of gelatin-coated gold nanorods on its thermal properties for photothermal application

The development of Gold nanorods (AuNRs) as phototherapeutic agents (PTAs) has attracted much interest from researchers in recent decades. The majority of their synthetic methods use Hydroquinone (HQ) and Ascorbic acid (AA) as the reducing agent, and these have been shown to affect the properties of AuNRs. However, no study has been conducted on how these two reducing reagents can affect their application, especially after coating. Therefore, we herein report a seed-mediated synthesis of AuNRs using two reducing agents and coating them with gelatin at different volume ratios (1:5, 1:2, 1:1,2:1, and 5:1). The HQ-reduced AuNRs and AA-reduced AuNRs absorbed at TSPR of 512 nm and 514 nm and LSPR of 914 nm and 847 nm, respectively. The gelatin-coated HQ-reduced and AA-reduced AuNRs did not show significant LSPR wavelength changes for all the volume ratios. However, a slight increase in the TSPR and the absorbance at regions below 550 nm was seen for volume ratios 1:1, 2:1, and 5:1. The thermal stability studies at 70 ℃ for the coated materials revealed that AA-reduced AuNRs were more thermally stable than HQ-reduced AuNRs, with the less optical shift. The coated AA-reduced AuNRs were further tested for photothermal responses. The results show that the high gelatin volume during coating affects the photothermal response of the AuNRs. This study indicates volume ratio of 1:5 and 1:2 has good stability while maintaining the good photothermal profiling needed in PTT applications. Hence Gel@AuNRs synthesised with AA is an excellent PTT agent for phototherapy applications.