Quantitative analysis of nanoparticle internalization in mammalian cells by high resolution X-ray microscopy

BackgroundQuantitative analysis of nanoparticle uptake at the cellular level is critical to nanomedicine procedures. In particular, it is required for a realistic evaluation of their effects. Unfortunately, quantitative measurements of nanoparticle uptake still pose a formidable technical challenge. We present here a method to tackle this problem and analyze the number of metal nanoparticles present in different types of cells. The method relies on high-lateral-resolution (better than 30 nm) transmission x-ray microimages with both absorption contrast and phase contrast -- including two-dimensional (2D) projection images and three-dimensional (3D) tomographic reconstructions that directly show the nanoparticles.ResultsPractical tests were successfully conducted on bare and polyethylene glycol (PEG) coated gold nanoparticles obtained by x-ray irradiation. Using two different cell lines, EMT and HeLa, we obtained the number of nanoparticle clusters uptaken by each cell and the cluster size. Furthermore, the analysis revealed interesting differences between 2D and 3D cultured cells as well as between 2D and 3D data for the same 3D specimen.ConclusionsWe demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of our method, proving that it is accurate enough to measure the nanoparticle uptake differences between cells as well as the sizes of the formed nanoparticle clusters. The differences between 2D and 3D cultures and 2D and 3D images stress the importance of the 3D analysis which is made possible by our approach.

• Publication year

  2011

• Venue

  Journal of Nanobiotechnology

• Publication date

  2011-04-10

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Materials Science, Engineering

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1186/1477-3155-9-14PMID 21477355PMCID 3098147
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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