The effect of sedimentation and diffusion on cellular uptake of gold nanoparticles

By E. Cho, Qiang Zhang, Younan Xia. Nature Nanotechnology, 2011

685 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In vitro experiments typically measure the uptake of nanoparticles by exposing cells at the bottom of a culture plate to a suspension of nanoparticles, which is assumed to be well-dispersed. However, nanoparticles can sediment and this means the concentration of particles on the cell surface and those actually taken up by the cells may be higher than the initial bulk concentration. Here we use upright and inverted cell culture configurations to show that cellular uptake of gold nanoparticles depends on the sedimentation and diffusion velocities of the nanoparticles and is independent of size, shape, density, surface coating and initial concentration of the nanoparticles. Generally more nanoparticles are taken up in the upright configuration than the inverted one and nanoparticles that sediment faster showed greater differences in uptake between the two configurations. Our results suggest that cellular uptake of nanoparticles is sensitive to the way cells are positioned and sedimentation need to be considered when performing in vitro studies for large and heavy nanoparticles.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/431a514a8b439da8612575ccfbfc4f559880b38f

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In Biomaterials

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Interaction of nanoparticles with proteins: relation to bio-reactivity of the nanoparticle (2013, background): “This was clearly demonstrated by exposing human breast cancer cells to gold NPs in upright or inverted configurations [64].”
Engineered nanoparticles interacting with cells: size matters (2014, background): “The uptake efficiency might even be affected by specific properties of the experimental setup [16].”
Organ-on-a-Chip Platforms for Studying Drug Delivery Systems (2014, background): “Evaluating the drug carrier in static in vitro assays without considering mechanical forces and fluid flow has shown instances of false positives [13,17,22].”
Role of cell cycle on the cellular uptake and dilution of nanoparticles in a cell population. (2011, background): “of the nanoparticle, sedimentation effects of large and dense particle”
Size-dependent cytotoxicity of silver nanoparticles in human lung cells: the role of cellular uptake, agglomeration and Ag release (2014, background): “mentation and may ultimately result in changes in the exposure doses and uptake rates [44].”