Cells are very good at protecting their precious contents — and as a result, it’s very difficult to penetrate their membrane walls to deliver drugs, nutrients or biosensors without damaging or destroying the cell. One effective way of doing so, discovered in 2008, is to use nanoparticles of pure gold, coated with a thin layer of a special polymer. But nobody knew exactly why this combination worked so well, or how it made it through the cell wall.

Now, researchers at MIT and the Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne in Switzerland have figured out how the process works, and the limits on the sizes of particles that can be used.

The team demonstrated that the crucial first step in the process is for coated gold nanoparticles to fuse with the lipids — a category of natural fats, waxes and vitamins — that form the cell wall. The scientists also demonstrated an upper limit on the size of such particles that can penetrate the cell wall — a limit that depends on the composition of the particle’s coating.

The coating applied to the gold particles consists of a mix of hydrophobic and hydrophilic components that form a monolayer — a layer just one molecule thick — on the particle’s surface. Any of several different compounds can be used, the researchers explain.

Since the nanoparticles themselves are completely coated, the fact that they are made of gold doesn’t have any direct effect, except that gold nanoparticles are an easily prepared model system, the researchers say. However, there is some evidence that the gold particles have therapeutic properties, which could be a side benefit.

Gold particles are also very good at capturing X-rays — so if they could be made to penetrate cancer cells, and were then heated by a beam of X-rays, they could destroy those cells from within.

Significantly, the mechanism that allows the nanoparticles to pass through the membrane seems also to seal the opening as soon as the particle has passed.

A researcher  says that his lab is also interested in harnessing this cell-penetrating mechanism as a way of delivering drugs to the cell’s interior, by binding them to the surface coating material. One important step in making that a useful process, he says, is finding ways to allow the nanoparticle coatings to be selective about what types of cells they attach to.

Another potential application of this work could be in attaching or inserting biosensing molecules on or into certain cells, a researcher says. In this way, scientists could detect or monitor specific biochemical markers, such as proteins that indicate the onset or decline of a disease or a metabolic process.

In general, attachment to nanoparticles’ surface coatings could provide a key to cells’ interiors for “molecules that normally wouldn’t have any ability to get through the cell membrane,” the researcher says.

This story is reprinted from material from MIT, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.