Silver nanoparticles are known to be distributed in many tissues after oral or inhalation exposure. Thus, understanding the tissue clearance of such distributed nanoparticles is very important to understand the behavior of silver nanoparticles in vivo. For risk assessment purposes, easy clearance indicates a lower overall cumulative toxicity. Accordingly, to investigate the clearance of tissue silver concentrations following oral silver nanoparticle exposure, Sprague–Dawley rats were assigned to 3 groups: control, low dose (100 mg/kg body weight), and high dose (500 mg/kg body weight), and exposed to two different sizes of silver nanoparticles (average diameter 10 and 25 nm) over 28 days. Thereafter, the rats were allowed to recover for 4 months. Regardless of the silver nanoparticle size, the silver content in most tissues gradually decreased during the 4-month recovery period, indicating tissue clearance of the accumulated silver. The exceptions were the silver concentrations in the brain and testes, which did not clear well, even after the 4-month recovery period, indicating an obstruction in transporting the accumulated silver out of these tissues. Therefore, the results showed that the size of the silver nanoparticles did not affect their tissue distribution. Furthermore, biological barriers, such as the blood–brain barrier and blood-testis barrier, seemed to play an important role in the silver clearance from these tissues.

A variety of porphyrin arrays connected together with different linkage were devised for possible applications to molecular optoelectronic devices such as wires, logic gates, and artificial light-harvesting arrays, etc. It has been relatively well established that the light signal transmission in these molecular assemblies is based on exciton migration process, which possibly gives rise to the structural changes during the exciton delocalization process. Zinc(II) 5,15-di(3,5-di-tert-butylphenyl)porphyrin (Z1), its directly meso,meso-linked porphyrin dimer (Z2), trimer (Z3), and tetramer (Z4) were synthesized with the goal to elucidate the relationship between exciton migration and structural change upon photoexcitation. One of the most important factors in structural changes for these porphyrin arrays is mainly determined by the dihedral angle between adjacent porphyrin moieties. For a systematic approach toward the investigation of the exciton coupling dynamics influenced by the relative orientation between neighboring porphyrin molecules, various time-resolved spectroscopic techniques such as fluorescence decay and transient absorption measurements with different polarization in pump/probe beams have been utilized. The steady-state excitation anisotropy spectra of Z2, Z3, and Z4 porphyrin arrays show that the photoexcitation of the high-energy exciton Soret band induces a large angle change between absorption and emission dipoles in contrast with the photoexcitation of the lowenergy exciton split Soret and Q-bands. In the order of Z1, Z2, Z3, and Z4, their S 1 states decay faster because of the increasing energy dissipation processes into a larger number of accessible states. In contrast, the rotational diffusion rates become slower in the same order because the overall molecular shape is elongated along the long axis of the molecular arrays, which experiences a large displacement of solvent molecules in rotational diffusion motion. Ultrafast fluorescence decay measurements show that the S 2 f S 1 internal conversion process occurs in less than 1 ps in Z2, Z3, and Z4 due to the existence of exciton split band as a ladder-type deactivation channel, while this process is relatively slow in Z1 (∼1.6 ps). Femtosecond transient absorption experiments with magic angle and different polarization in probe beam were performed to find the relationship between energy relaxation and anisotropy dynamics upon photoexcitation. The internal conversion in Z2, Z3, and Z4 is likely to be accompanied by the incoherent energy hopping processes occurring in less than ∼200 fs judging from a large change in the anisotropy value in the transient absorption decay. In addition, the decay components with approximately 8 ps time constant were observed in both fluorescence up-conversion and femtosecond transient absorption decays. These components are believed to arise from the conformational change in the excited states, because the dihedral angle distribution in these arrays was estimated to be 90°( 20°at ambient temperature from the AM1 ...

SummaryDevelopment of reliable cell-based nanotoxicology assays is important for evaluation of potentially hazardous engineered nanomaterials. Challenges to producing a reliable assay protocol include working with nanoparticle dispersions and living cell lines, and the potential for nano-related interference effects. Here we demonstrate the use of a 96-well plate design with several measurement controls and an interlaboratory comparison study involving five laboratories to characterize the robustness of a nanocytotoxicity MTS cell viability assay based on the A549 cell line. The consensus EC 50 values were 22.1 mg/L (95% confidence intervals 16.9 mg/L to 27.2 mg/L) and 52.6 mg/L (44.1 mg/L to 62.6 mg/L) for positively charged polystyrene nanoparticles for the serum-free and serum conditions, respectively, and 49.7 µmol/L (47.5 µmol/L to 51.5 µmol/L) and 77.0 µmol/L (54.3 µmol/L to 99.4 µmol/L) for positive chemical control cadmium sulfate for the serum-free and serum conditions, respectively. Results from the measurement controls can be used to evaluate the sources of variability and their relative magnitudes within and between laboratories. This information revealed steps of the protocol that may need to be modified to improve the overall robustness and precision. The results suggest that protocol details such as cell line ID, media exchange, cell handling, and nanoparticle dispersion are critical to ensure protocol robustness and comparability of nanocytotoxicity assay results. The combination of system control measurements and interlaboratory comparison data yielded insights that would not have been available by either approach by itself.

A subnanometer gap-separated linear chain gold nanoparticle (AuNP) silica nanotube peapod (SNTP) was fabricated by self-assembly. The geometrical configurations of the AuNPs inside the SNTPs were managed in order to pose either a single-line or a double-line nanostructure by controlling the diameters of the AuNPs and the orifice in the silica nanotubes (SNTs). The AuNPs were internalized and self-assembled linearly inside the SNTs by capillary force using a repeated wet-dry process on a rocking plate. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) images clearly indicated that numerous nanogap junctions with sub-1-nm distances were formed among AuNPs inside SNTs. Finite-dimension time domain (FDTD) calculations were performed to estimate the electric field enhancements. Polarization-dependent surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) spectra of bifunctional aromatic linker p-mercaptobenzoic acid (p-MBA)-coated AuNP-embedded SNTs supported the linearly aligned nanogaps. We could demonstrate a silica wall-protected nanopeapod sensor with single nanotube sensitivity. SNTPs have potential application to intracellular pH sensors after endocytosis in mammalian cells for practical purposes. The TEM images indicated that the nanogaps were preserved inside the cellular constituents. SNTPs exhibited superior quality SERS spectra in vivo due to well-sustained nanogap junctions inside the SNTs, when compared to simply using AuNPs without any silica encapsulation. By using these SNTPs, a robust intracellular optical pH sensor could be developed with the advantage of the sustained nanogaps, due to silica wall-protection.

Bright lights: Fullerene-silica hybrid nanoparticles have bright photoluminescence, high photostability, and low cytotoxicity, which are assets for bioimaging agents. The origin of the photoluminescence of the nanoparticle is the C-O-Si bond (see picture).