Research interest in ultra small gold thiolate clusters has been rising in recent years for the challenges they offer to bring together properties of nanoscience and well-defined materials from molecular chemistry. Here, a new atomically well-defined Au-10 gold nanocluster surrounded by ten 4-aminothiophenolate ligands is reported. Its synthesis followed the similar conditions reported for the elaboration of Au-144(SR)(60), but because the reactivity of thiophenol ligands is different from alkanethiol derivates, smaller Au-10 clusters were formed. Different techniques, such as ESI-MS, elemental analysis, XRD, TGA, XPS and UV-vis-NIR experiments, have been carried out to determine the Au-10(SPh-pNH(2))(10) formula. Photo-emission experiment has been done and reveals that the Au-10 clusters are weakly luminescent as opposed to the amino-based ultra-small gold clusters. This observation points out that the emission of gold thiolate clusters is highly dependent on both the structure of the gold core and the type of the ligands at the surface. In addition, ultra-small amino-functionalized clusters offer the opportunity for extended work on self-assembling networks or deposition on substrates for nanotechnologies or catalytic applications. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.