We present the first comprehensive investigation on water-soluble nanoparticles embedded into a paramagnetic shell and their properties as an MRI contrast agent. The nanoprobes are constructed with an inorganic core embedded into an ultra-thin silica shell covalently linked to chelated Gd{sup 3+} paramagnetic ions that act as an MRI contrast agent. The chelator contains the molecule DOTA and the inorganic core contains a fluorescent CdSe/ZnS qdots in Au nanoparticles. Optical properties of the cores (fluorescence emission or plasmon position) are not affected by the neither the silica shell nor the presence of the chelated paramagnetic ions. The resulting complex is a MRI/fluorescence probe with a diameter of 8 to 15 nm. This probe is highly soluble in high ionic strength buffers at pH ranging from {approx}4 to 11. In MRI experiments at clinical field strengths of 60 MHz, the QDs probes posses spin-lattice (T{sub 1}) and a spin-spin (T{sub 2}) relaxivities of 1018.6 +/- 19.4 mM{sup -1} s{sup -1} and 2438.1 +/- 46.3 mM{sup -1} s{sup -1} respectively for probes having {approx}8 nm. This increase in relaxivity has been correlated to the number of paramagnetic ions covalently linked to the silica shell, ranging from approximately 45 to over 320. We found that each bound chelated paramagnetic species contributes by over 23 mM{sup -1} s{sup -1} to the total T{sub 1} and by over 54 mM{sup -1} s{sup -1} to the total T{sub 2} relaxivity respectively. The contrast power is modulated by the number of paramagnetic moieties linked to the silica shell and is only limited by the number of chelated paramagnetic species that can be packed on the surface. So far, the sensitivity of our probes is in the 100 nM range for 8-10 nm particles and reaches 10 nM for particles with approximately 15-18 nm in diameter. The sensitivities values in solutions are equivalent of those obtained with small superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles of 7 nm diameter clustered into a 100 nm polymeric shell. A thin paramagnetic silica shell as interface with the bioworld presents several advantages over polymeric coating or dendrimers in terms of in vivo biocompatibility and ease of functionalization with targeting biomolecules. Theoretically, these relaxivity values are high enough to be detected by MRI of a single cell labeled with 10{sup 5} probes. We briefly discuss the importance of probes coated with a paramagnetic silica shell for the detection and treatment of diseases in vivo
