A study describes a key process to define the safety of nanoparticles in humans
A team of the Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology of the University of Barcelona (IN2UB) led a study, published in the journal ACS Nano, which describes the process through which nanoparticles are coated by proteins once they are inside our bodies. This is a key process to establish the safety of nanoparticles in humans.
A team of the Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology of the University of Barcelona (IN2UB) led a study, published in the journal ACS Nano, which describes the process through which nanoparticles are coated by proteins once they are inside our bodies. This is a key process to establish the safety of nanoparticles in humans.
The team of the University of Barcelona, led by the IN2UB researcher Giancarlo Franzese, has studied the time evolution of the protein corona, which is forming around the nanoparticle, “This is an essential phenomenon to understand how the nanoparticle interacts with cells and where it ends”, says the researcher. “The study is the basis for possible clinical applications and safety evaluations on nanoparticles, necessary for the increasing exploitation of these, in daily-use products (food, varnish, phones, etc.) or for those created by environmental pollution (car gas discharger, industrial activities, etc.)” says Franzese.
The theoretic work led by the IN2UB team allowed designing a series of experiments, carried out in Dublin and Munich. When a pristine nanoparticle enters a biological flow, biomolecules spontaneously create adsorption layers and adhere around the nanoparticleʼs surface creating the protein corona. The composition of the corona depends on the time evolution of the environmental conditions and it regulates the final fate of the nanoparticles.
“The corona formation process is a challenge due the large number of involved molecules and the large span of the time scale of the process, which can range from a hundred microseconds to hours”, says Oriol Vilanova, researcher of the UB and first author of the study. The study is a combination of experiments, simulations and theoretical calculations to find the corona kinetics and the final composition of silica nanoparticles in a model plasma with three blood proteins (serum albumin, transferrin and fibrinogen). “The combination of computational models and experiments is the first step to predict and control of the nanoparticle protein corona composition, based on the balance of the protein binding constants” says Vilanova.
“The results allowed us explaining a “memory” effect that set the long-time composition of the corona according on the evolution of the environment surrounding the nanoparticle, something that had never been understood before” concludes Franzese.
Article reference:
O. Vilanova, J. J. Mittag,.P. M. Kelly,S. Milani,K. A. Dawson, J. O. Radler and G. Franzese. «Understanding the kinetics of protein-nanoparticle corona formation». ACS Nano, November, 2016. Doi: 10.1021/acsnano.6b04858