Dark field imaging and silica nanorattles

According the Apr. 26, 2013 Science China Press news release on EurekAlert, bioimaging and disease diagnosis using gold nanoparticles have not progressed as hoped for due to issues with their biocompatibility and stability in body fluids (I believe there are some translation issues),

In many metal materials, gold nanoparticles have caused concerns [I think ‘interest’ is closer to what they meant] in the field because of its simple preparation, easy to modify advantages. However, the poor stability in physiological fluids environment and the potential toxicity of gold nanoparticles always restricts its application in the biological field.

TANG Fangqiong and her group from Laboratory of Controllable Preparation and Application of Nanomaterials, Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences have been devoted to the controllable preparation of nanomaterials and biological applications. In recent years, they invented a method to fabricate silica nanoparticles with the special rattles-type structure named silica nanorattles (SNs) and developed the nanoparticles as drug delivery system, biological detection and catalytic. Their work, entitled “Dark field imaging of rattle-type silica nanorattles coated gold nanoparticles in vitro and in vivo”, was published in Chinese Science Bulletin 2013, Vol 58(7).

In this paper, the gold nanoparticles were ingeniously hybridized into the hollow cavity of silica nanorattles. Then, a new type silica nanorattles coated gold nanoparticles (Silica nanorattles @ gold nanoparticles, SN @ GNs) was obtained. It has advantage as following, scale preparation, good stability in the physiological environment and reduce gold nanoparticles agglomeration. These particles remained the strong optical scattering of gold nanoparticles and plasma resonance properties which can be used in dark field imaging of cells and animal tissues in vivo … . And more important[,] the silica nanoshells significantly reduced the toxicity of gold nanoparticles in vivo, which increase[d] the maximum tolerated dose to 200 mg/kg.

Above all, TANG group have developed a new type of composite nanoparticles [combining] silica[‘s] good biocompatibility and the optical properties of gold nanoparticles. It provides a new material and method for the application of nanomaterials in biological imaging and disease diagnosis.

For clarity, I have made a few changes to the text I excerpted from the news release.

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

LIU TianLong, TAN LongFei, LIU HuiYu, FU ChangHui, CHEN Dong, and TANG FangQiong. Dark field imaging of rattle-type silica nanorattles coated gold nanoparticles in vitro and in vivo[J]. Chinese Science Bulletin, 2013, 58(7): 531-536.

While the abstract is available in English, you will need to be able to read Chinese for the rest of paper, which appears to be behind a paywall.

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