Abstract
Electroporation assisted metallic nanoparticle delivery has been shown by our previous work to significantly reduce the time of sample preparation for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) measurements of biological cells. In this paper, we report our experimental work to optimize the electroporation parameters, including adjustment of the pulse pattern, operation temperature, and electroporation buffer, for fastest delivery of silver nanoparticles into living C666 cells (a human nasopharyngeal carcinoma cell line). The delivery efficiency was evaluated by the integrated intensity of whole cell SERS spectrum. Our work concluded that the silver nanoparticle delivery rate is best under the electroporation condition of using 4 consecutive 350 V (875 V/cm) rectangular electric pulses of 1, 10, 10 and 1 ms durations, respectively. Low temperature (0–4°C) is necessary for keeping cell viability during the electroporation process and it also improves the delivery efficiency of silver nanoparticles. The serum in the buffer has no obvious effect on the delivery efficiency.
Highlights
With advantages in detection sensitivity, selectivity and specificity, surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) spectroscopy is an analytical method with rapid expanding applications in chemical and biochemical analysis and detection
The cell morphology was observed by 50× microscopy
Our study shows that the survival rate of C666 cells with electroporation operated in room temperature was inferior to when the cells were electroporated at the low temperature (0–4◦C)
Summary
With advantages in detection sensitivity, selectivity and specificity, surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) spectroscopy is an analytical method with rapid expanding applications in chemical and biochemical analysis and detection One such new application is intracellular SERS measurement, in which the metallic nanoparticles such as colloidal silver or gold are delivered into living cells to serve as the enhancing agent. Yu et al / Optimizing electroporation assisted silver nanoparticle delivery into living C666 cells for SERS prior to the SERS experiments Besides this technique, biosynthesis of nanoparticles has been tried in intracellular SERS study. Gold nanoparticles grown within the intracellular confines of living cells were introduced as potential SERS substrates in a few studies [1,27] Both the endocytosis technique and the biosynthesis technique are time-consuming. For many biomedical applications, such as cancer screening, keeping the cells alive for such a long time and delivering nanoparticles in such a slow fashion bring extra procedures and increase the cost
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