Abstract
Nanoparticles (NPs) exposed to a biological milieu will strongly interact with proteins, forming “coronas” on the surfaces of the NPs. The protein coronas (PCs) affect the properties of the NPs and provide a new biological identity to the particles in the biological environment. The characterization of NP-PC complexes has attracted enormous research attention, owing to the crucial effects of the properties of an NP-PC on its interactions with living systems, as well as the diverse applications of NP-PC complexes. The analysis of NP-PC complexes without a well-considered approach will inevitably lead to misunderstandings and inappropriate applications of NPs. This review introduces methods for the characterization of NP-PC complexes and investigates their recent applications in biomedicine. Furthermore, the review evaluates these characterization methods based on comprehensive critical views and provides future perspectives regarding the applications of NP-PC complexes.
Highlights
Advances in material science have made it possible to synthesize nanoparticles (NPs) with specific sizes, shapes, compositions, and surface properties; these attributes play decisive roles in the functions of NPs
The results reveal that the selection of an appropriate protein type for coating a given group of NPs is crucial for regulating their cellular uptake in specific cells
It has been suggested that bovine serum albumin (BSA), human serum albumin (HSA), and/or heat-inactivated fetal calf serum (FeCS) coronas enhance the immune responses of THP-1 cells to AgNPs, and that the use of BSA and HSA stimulates different inflammatory cytokine secretions and higher activation in cells exposed to AgNPs, i.e., higher in 10% of heat inactivated FeCS than in 10% of HSA
Summary
Advances in material science have made it possible to synthesize nanoparticles (NPs) with specific sizes, shapes, compositions, and surface properties; these attributes play decisive roles in the functions of NPs. The composition of a PC is controlled by multiple factors, in general, according to the binding affinity and rate of exchange of proteins from the NP’s surface, the PC around an NP can be divided into two parts: a hard corona and soft corona (Figure 1) [26,27,28]. The values of kon and koff are related to the contact frequency and binding energy of the proteins and NPs, respectively The balance between these two factors plays an important role in determining the affinity of a protein to an NP and is generally defined as the dissociation constant (Kd ). It is anticipated that this review could lead to more practical and meaningful guidelines for the biomedical applications of NP-PC complexes
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