5 nm Non-Functional Nanogold® is a highly soluble, non-ionizing, regular 5 nm coated gold nanoparticle.
- Use as a fiducial marker: 5 nm Non-Functional Nanogold® is highly regular, stable and biocompatible. Use as a small fiducial marker for aligning high-resolution tilt sections or for electron tomography.
- Use for sizing: 5 nm Non-Functional Nanogold® is highly regular in size: the gold nanoparticle is 5 nm in diameter, and the overall diameter, including the shell, is close to 10 nm. Use to determine size limits for crossing cellular junctions or for sizing pores.
- Use for mapping: 5 nm Non-Functional Nanogold® is highly water-soluble, stable, and non-ionizing. It has minimal affinity for proteins or cellular components, and therefore may be used to map contiguous internal spaces, such as neurons or vacuoles, or connectivity.
5 nm Nanogold® Labeling Reagents
The precision and versatility of Nanogold®, now in a larger 5 nm size
Like our smaller 1.4 nm Nanogold® reagents, it covalently reacts at specific sites under mild buffer conditions. This gives a well defined product that can be purified chromatographically or by ammonium sulfate precipitation.
Unlike conventional colloidal gold, 5 nm Nanogold® does not require any additional macromolecules for stabilization. Conjugate probes are smaller than colloidal gold probes and achieve higher resolution, more precise and more nearly quantitative labeling.
Make any molecule a gold probe
Nanogold® brings the versatility of fluorescent conjugation to gold labeling. Now you have a choice of sizes for Nanogold®: 0.8, 1.4, 5 or 12 nm, enabling multiple labeling for electron microscopy without silver or gold enhancement!
- Antibodies
- Proteins
- Peptides
- Oligonucleotides and nucleosides: DNA, RNA and PNA
- Nanostructured materials
- Hormones
- Polymers
- Surfaces

Unconjugated 5 nm Nanogold®, showing monodisperse, highly regular, spherically symmetrical 5 nm gold core and uniform, thin and consistent ligand coating. This ensures a highly regular particle size, smaller probe size, and reliable, reproducible labeling and EM results.
Easily enhanced for electron microscopy, light microscopy, cryo-EM, blots…
Try our precision nanoparticle developers for easily controlled development with low background!
Features and Advantages
- Stable, soluble and biocompatible: Designer coating gives solubility and biocompatibility for in vivo use. No residual charge means minimal non-specific binding.
- Highly monodisperse. Size variation less than 15% for 5 nm gold. 1.4, 5 and 12 nm Nanogold® enable up to triple labeling with non-overlapping sizes
- Molecular precision: make smaller primary probes that get the gold closer to the target.
- Site-specific conjugation enables programmed incorporation into nanostructured materials or components of self-assembling systems.
- No need for additional proteins or polymers: smaller probes penetrate better and label more densely.
- Easily enhanced. Silver or gold enhancement enlarges while retaining monodispersity – or affords super-sensitive detection for blots and optical systems.
- Pick the optimum size: smaller for high resolution, molecular labeling, larger for visualization on a cellular scale.
Although larger than our 1.4 nm Nanogold®, our new 5 nm Nanogold® is still relatively small in size, and highly uniform. Because it does not require additional proteins for stabilization, 5 nm Nanogold® conjugates are smaller than most conjugates prepared with conventional colloidal gold and uniform in overall size, giving them faster and more consistent penetration into specimens.
If larger particle sizes are needed, 5 nm Nanogold® may easily be enhanced with GoldEnhance™ gold enhancement reagents, or our HQ Silver™ or LI Silver™ silver enhancement reagents: Depending on the reagents used, a brief exposure (1 – 4 minutes) produce highly visible grains 10-20 nm in size for electron microscope identification, while longer development times produce black signals, readily differentiated from organic chromogens, that are easily seen in the light microscope and on immunoblots, gels and Western blots.

