CC BY
1DOI 10.24412/cl-37136-2023-1-147-147
PROBING THE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN NANOPARTICLES AND CELLS THROUGH DARKFIELD IMAGING AND RAMAN SPECTROSCOPY
RUI HU, ZHENHAO MO AND YANHUA ZOU
Center for Biomedical Photonics & College of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering, Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Devices and Systems, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, P. R. China
rhu@szu.edu.cn
ABSTRACT
In the past decades, functionalized nanomaterials have well been developed and attracted increasing attentions in biomedical research. They have found wide applications in bioimaging, biosensing and disease diagnosis and therapy. However, up to date, there has been very few formulations adopted in clinical practices. Among all nanomaterials, inorganic nanoparticles, such as semiconductor quantum dots, carbon nanomaterials, up-conversion nanoparticles, various 2-D nanomaterials, and metallic nanoparticles, have demonstrated outstanding physicochemical properties in biomedical applications. Recent reports have shown their great potential in targeted imaging, tracking, drug delivery and therapy. However, almost none of these inorganic nanoparticles have been approved by the FDA for clinical settings. One of the most discussed hurdles is their potential risk when introduced in vivo. No matter how many advantages they share, their accumulation in the major organs and the unclear long-term route in the biological system have greatly discouraged the clinicians. To sort out this problem, one should thoroughly and carefully examine the interactions between the nanoparticles and the biological system in details. In this contribution, we would like to introduce the recent developments in nanoparticle design and the efforts made in understanding the interactions between them and the biological system, down to the subcellular level. Due to their inert chemical properties, noble metal nanoparticles were regarded as chemically stable in biological system, and over previous study have shown that the gold nanoparticles would be intact and last over three months in mice, yet did not cause any adverse influence to the animal. In this work, gold nanoparticles have been adopted as a model nanoparticle to probe the interactions between the nanoparticles and the cells. Due to the localized surface plasmon resonance, the gold nanoparticles could be easily tracked through dark-field imaging and colocalized with subcellular organelles through fluorescent imaging. Through tracking and imaging, we found that the functionalized gold nanoparticles were transferred from endosomes to lysosomes and excreted through exocytosis. Also, the cell cycle of the macrophage was arrested at different stages for nanoparticle with different surface modifications. Further investigation has shown that the surface modification of the nanorods could alter the interactions between the nanoparticles and the proteins and lead to different results. The nanoparticles were further labelled with Raman reporters and the interactions between them and the subcellular structures were probed with Raman spectroscopy. These findings would provide some details on the nanoparticle-cell interactions and help us to get a better understanding on this issue.
REFERENCES
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