Seed mediated one-pot growth of versatile heterogeneous upconversion nanocrystals for multimodal bioimaging

The rapid development of a variety of molecular contrast agents makes the multimodality bioimaging highly attractive

towards higher resolution, more sensitive, informative diagnosis. The key lies in the development of facile material

synthesis that allows the integration of multiple contrast agents, ideally in a way that each of the components should

be logically assembled to maximize their performances. Here, we report the one-pot programmable growth of

multifunctional heterogeneous nanocrystal with tunable size, shape, composition, and properties. We demonstrated a

facile one-pot hot-injection method to enable the highly selectively controlled growth of different sodium lanthanide

fluoride nanomaterials in either longitudinal or transversal directions with atomic scale precision. This technique

allows the upconversion luminescence signal, MRI signal and x-ray signal logically integrated and optimized within

one single versatile nanoplatform for multimode bioimaging. These findings suggest that the facile strategy developed

here have the promising to get the desired heterogeneous nanocrystals as an all-in-one contrast agent for integrated

and self-correlative multimodal bioimaging.