Fluorescent Protein-metal oxide NanoParticles for Bio-hybrid Light-Emitting Diodes

White light-emitting diodes (WLEDs) are the future of the artificial illumination promising to reduce 20% of the global electricity consumption in 2025.

Nowadays, the main concern of the WLED technology is its sustainable development with respect to the inorganic phosphors (IPs) due to toxicity, environmental hazardousness, scarcity, high costs, and lack of efficient recycling protocols.

In this context, bio-hybrid WHLEDs (Bio-WHLED) is emerging as a solid alternative showing how to replace IPs for sustainable fluorescent protein (FPs) embedded in a polymer matrix.

In detail, Bio-WHLEDs take advantage of highly emissive blue, green, and red FPs that are stabilized into a rigid or elastomeric polymeric matrix over years under ambient storage and over months under device operation conditions.

One of the main challenges towards stable and efficient Bio-WHLEDs consists in the difficult control of spatial distribution of FPs, which implies nonefficient energy transfer processes related to the distance in the polymeric matrix.

Moreover, the overheating of Bio-WHLEDs related to the free motion of FP into the polymer matrix leads to the melting of the polymeric matrix and the quick photobleaching of the FPs due to the H-transfer deactivation of the chromophore under continuous excitation.

To circumvent these limitations, we propose to develop highly efficient and stable Bio-WHLEDs using single-layered color filters with new white-emitting core-shell FP-nanoparticles (FPNP), in which a white-emitting core in the form of either a mixture of FPs or oligomeric white FPs is protected by a double shell of silica/metal oxide that will simultaneously avoid heat generation (protein motion) and H-transfer processes.