Formation of a ‘protein corona’ on the Fe3O4@SiO2 nanoparticles surface

Abstract

The patterns of interaction of the nanoparticles surface with protein components of biosystems have been studied on the example of the interaction of magnetic nanoparticles of the core–shell structure with albumin. Data on particle sizes and their spectra in the visible region in the presence of different quantity of protein have been obtained and analyzed by sorption, spectral and dynamic light scattering methods and albumin sorption isotherms in various media. The formation of the ordered protein monolayer (so-called ‘hard corona’) with subsequent forming of the multilayer of a different structure (‘soft corona’) has been experimentally shown; it demonstrates that it is possible to computationally distinguish between mono- and multi-layer using data from sorption experiments.