Monday, January 19, 2015

Ultrasound-mediated method for rapid delivery of nano-particles into cells for intracellular surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy and cancer cell screening

Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is a powerful technology for providing finger-printing information of cells. A big challenge has been the long time duration and inefficient uptake of metal nano-particles into living cells as substrate for SERS analysis. Herein, a simple method (based on ultrasound) for the rapid transfer of silver nanoparticles (NPs) into living cells for intracellular SERS spectroscopy was presented. In this study, the ultrasound-mediated method for NP delivery overcame the shortcoming of ‘passive uptake’, and achieved quick acquisition of reproducible SERS spectra from living human nasopharyngeal carcinoma cell lines (C666 and CNE1) and normal nasopharyngeal cell line (NP69). Tentative assignment of the Raman bands in the measured SERS spectra showed cancer cell specific biomolecular differences, including significantly lower DNA concentrations and higher protein concentrations in cancerous nasopharyngeal cells as compared to those of normal cells. C...

Shangyuan Feng, Zhihua Li, Guannan Chen, Duo Lin, Shaohua Huang, Zufang Huang, Yongzeng Li, Juqiang Lin, Rong Chen and Haishan Zeng

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