Abstract
The development of nanomaterials for biological and biotechnological applications is an area of research that holds great promise. In particular, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are attracting an increasing level of attention since they hold unique optical and mechanical properties, have a large surface, diameters on the nanometric scale, and are capable to penetrate the membrane of mammalian cells without causing any damage while transporting small molecules as nucleic acids, peptides and proteins. Mechanisms have been independently reported to explain the internalization of CNT into cells: 1) an energy-dependent mechanism and 2) an energy-independent process. In order to elucidate the cellular uptake mechanism of CNTs, in this work we present a study of the internalization of CNTs with different surface properties into giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs), which is a simple representation of the basic structure of the cellular membrane. This strategy allows us to follow the CNT internalization process by optical and confocal microscopy while applying controlled external fields.Thin multi-walled carbon nanotubes (thin-MWNTs) with hydrophobic (h-MWNTs) and hydrophilic (ox-MWNTs) surfaces were incubated with GUVs to elucidate if the mechanism of internalization, localization and effects on the membranes, are dependent on the type of carbon nanotubes functionalization.We observed that the ox-MWNT interact with the hydrophilic part of the GUVs and were localized mostly on the surface of the vesicles. However, h-MWNTs were able to interact with the membrane, forming different structures in the GUVs, like aggregates, rings of CNTs across their surface and the strangling of GUVs, which caused the union of 2 or more vesicles.Our observations reveal that functionalized thin-MWNTs are able to translocate across GUVs by an energy-independent process and their localization was different in each case, which suggest that their surface properties play a significant role in this process.
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