| abstract |
A new class of bioreagents is based on 'closed surface' dendrimers comprising a linker arm, a forking moiety and a reporter moiety that can conjugate to a label and to a biomolecule. The bioreagents include spherical polymers where polymerization is controlled in order to achieve step-wise propagation, and thus a preselected number of reporter groups (preferably amines) on the surface. Products of this step-growth are called generations, and the number of amine groups is doubled with each subsequent generation. For the present invention the range of dendrimer generations is about 3-20, and the preferred range is 8-12. |