Tag Archives: Molecular extraction in single live cells by sneaking in and out magnetic nanomaterials

Extracting biomolecules from live cells with carbon nanotubes

Being able to extract biomolecules from living cells means nondestruction of the rest of the cell and the ability to observe the consequences of the extraction. From a July 18, 2014 news item on Azonano,

University of Houston researchers have devised a new method for extracting molecules from live cells without disrupting cell development, work that could provide new avenues for the diagnosis of cancer and other diseases.

The researchers used magnetized carbon nanotubes to extract biomolecules from live cells, allowing them to retrieve molecular information without killing the individual cells. A description of the work appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A July 16, 2014 University of Houston news release by Jeannie Kever, which originated the news item, provides more detail,

Most current methods of identifying intracellular information result in the death of the individual cells, making it impossible to continue to gain information and assess change over time, said Zhifeng Ren, M.D. Anderson Chair professor of physics and principal investigator at the Center for Superconductivity at UH and lead author of the paper. The work was a collaboration between Ren’s lab and that of Paul Chu, T.L.L. Temple Chair of Science and founding director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity.

Chu, a co-author of the paper, said the new technique will allow researchers to draw fundamental information from a single cell.The researchers said the steps outlined in the paper offer proof of concept. Ren said the next step “will be more study of the biological and chemical processes of the cell, more analysis.”

The initial results hold promise for biomedicine, he said.  “This shows how nanoscience and nanoengineering can help the medical field.”

Cai said the new method will be helpful for cancer drug screening and carcinogenesis study, as well as for studies that allow researchers to obtain information from single cells, replacing previous sampling methods that average out cellular diversity and obscure the specificity of the biomarker profiles.

In the paper, the researchers explain their rationale for the work – most methods for extracting molecular information result in cell death, and those that do spare the cell carry special challenges, including limited efficiency.

This method is relatively straightforward, requiring the use of magnetized carbon nanotubes as the transporter and a polycarbonate filter as a collector, they report. Cells from a human embryonic kidney cancer cell line were used for the experiment.

The work builds on a 2005 paper published by Ren’s group in Nature Methods, which established that magnetized carbon nanotubes can deliver molecular payloads into cells. The current research takes that one step further to move molecules out of cells by magnetically driving them through the cell walls.

The carbon nanotubes were grown with a plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition system, with magnetic nickel particles enclosed at the tips. A layer of nickel was also deposited along the surface of individual nanotubes in order to make the nanotubes capable of penetrating a cell wall guided by a magnet.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Molecular extraction in single live cells by sneaking in and out magnetic nanomaterials by Zhen Yang, Liangzi Deng, Yucheng Lan, Xiaoliu Zhang, Zhonghong Gao, Ching-Wu Chu, Dong Cai, and Zhifeng Ren. PNAS 2014 ; published ahead of print July 16, 2014, doi:10.1073/pnas.1411802111

This paper is behind a paywall.