BSA modification to reduce CTAB induced nonspecificity and cytotoxicity of aptamer-conjugated gold nanorods

Abstract

Aptamer-conjugated gold nanorods (AuNRs) are excellent candidates for targeted hyperthermia therapy of cancer cells. However, in high concentrations of AuNRs, aptamer conjugation alone fails to result in highly cell-specific AuNRs due to the presence of positively charged cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) as a templating surfactant. Besides causing nonspecific electrostatic interactions with the cell surfaces, CTAB can also be cytotoxic, leading to uncontrolled cell death. To avoid the nonspecific interactions and cytotoxicity triggered by CTAB, we report the further biologically inspired modification of aptamer-conjugated AuNRs with bovine serum albumin (BSA) protein. Following this modification, interaction between CTAB and the cell surface was efficiently blocked, thereby dramatically reducing the side effects of CTAB. This approach may provide a general and simple method to avoid one of the most serious issues in biomedical applications of nanomaterials: nonspecific binding of the nanomaterials with biological cells.

Small gold nanorods laden macrophages for enhanced tumor coverage in photothermal therapy

“…Among the various Au nanostructures, Au nanorods (AuNRs) have aroused recent biomedical interest on account of their unique surface plasmon resonance (SPR) band in the NIR region [37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. Owing to the characteristic longitudinal SPR (LSPR) band, AuNRs have a larger NIR absorption cross section than other Au nanostructures such as Au nanoshells which have been studied in clinical trials [45].…”

Effects of Cetyltrimethylammonium Bromide on the Toxicity of Gold Nanorods Both In Vitro and In Vivo: Molecular Origin of Cytotoxicity and Inflammation

“…It has been reported that various properties such as size, surface charge, aspect ratio, and coating all contributed to the overall biological effect of Au NRs. Therefore, these parameters were generally taken into accounts when studying the interaction between the Au NRs and the biological systems .…”

“…Researchers thus put many efforts on developing methods to dissolve the toxicity of CTAB‐Au NRs. For example, modification via layer by layer assembly using polyelectrolyte polymer such as polystyrene sulfonate (PSS) and poly (diallyl dimethyl ammonium chloride) (PDDAC) to shield the toxic inner CTAB bilayer . Although the coating strategy could efficiently reduce the toxicity of CTAB, not all of the CTAB can be shielded.…”

Hybrid nanomaterial: biocolloidals

“…Examples of templating/stabilizing biomolecules can include graphene oxides (Devetter et al, 2015), bovine serum albumin (Giorgetti et al, 2012), and peptide bonds keeping different shapes of PtNPs between 2 and 8 nm in size (VazquezGonzalez and Carrillo-Carrion, 2014). These proteins can also block the undesired toxic effects of the templating agents in biomedical applications (Khiyami et al, 2014;Yasun et al, 2015). Dopamine has also been exploited for synthesizing PtNPs modified with the antibodies, producing a PtNPpoly(dopamine)-antibody composite (Vazquez-Gonzalez and Carrillo-Carrion, 2014).…”

“…Gelatin, as the most common derivative of collagen, and albumin, as the most abundant protein in plasma, can form materials and be obtained from harvested precursors, but self-assembled polypeptide structures are a broad and more utilized class of materials. For example, specific protein molecules and peptide structures, tertiary protein molecules (Jang and Kim, 2011;De Backer et al, 2015) (integrated with surfactants), casein (Tielemans et al, 2006;Qiu et al, 2012;Seisenbaeva et al, 2012;Yasun et al, 2015), various ionic structures, or two-faced peptides (Breitling et al, 2009;Coppage et al, 2012;Knez et al, 2013) will form self-assembled nanoscale structures in laboratory conditions (Newcomb et al, 2012). Protein cages offer different interior and exterior functional regions that can be utilized for different modifications and are one of the polypeptide-based materials that are increasingly being offered for bioapplications (Bhattacharya and Mukherjee, 2008;Mukherjee et al, 2014;Devetter et al, 2015;Kumar et al, 2015).…”