NANOPARTICLES AS SIGNAL REPORTERS IN BIOTECHNOLOGY
Open AccessThere is a growing interest in hybrid assemblies of nanoparticles and biomolecules for detection, biological imaging, signal reporting and targeted drug delivery. Nanoparticles are used in such broad applications due to their unique properties such as ease of preparation, ease of surface functionalization, biocompatibility, and ease of mobility in cells. Use of metal nanoparticles requires the control of size which is a crucial factor in determining the biological responses and optical properties of nanoparticles. In this study, a relation between size of nanoparticles and their surface plasmon resonance peak was obtained using UV-vis spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy and light scattering techniques. Due to its high selectivity, surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has been widely used for the detection of biomolecules and study of their conformation on metal surfaces. To be able to get the most intense Raman signals, the factors affecting surface enhanced Raman intensity such as nanoparticle size, pH, and solution suspension time have been studied. The optimum conditions which will give rise to intense Raman signals have been obtained. While nanoparticles have useful applications in medical research, their use needs to be monitored due to potential harm to human health and ecological systems. It is known that silver nanoparticles can transport heavy metals and other environmental contaminants to plants and animal cells and eventually to human cells. Therefore, the uptake of fluorophore tagged silver nanoparticles inside plant cells was studied. Although SERS has a lot of advantages over other spectroscopic methods, it has limitations in microscopy. Therefore, for the detection of nanoparticles inside plant cells a fluorescence technique has been used which is called metal enhanced fluorescence. Using this technique, it was shown that silver nanoparticles can function as a transport mechanism to carry fluorophore inside the cells. Understanding nanoparticle-protein interaction could help in discovering new applications of nanoparticles in the field of biotechnology. In order to investigate the functional groups responsible for this interaction, which could potentially affect the structure and activity, assemblies of gold nanoparticles and bacteriophage were studied using both computational and visualization tools as a side study. The absence of positive residues on the exposed coat proteins of the bacteriophage suggests that the primary binding between gold and bacteriophage is through ligand replacement of the citrate on the gold surface with exposed carboxylic acid groups on the bacteriophage surface.
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