Quantification of silver nanoparticles taken up by single cells using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry in the single cell measurement mode

Ana López-Serrano Oliver,Doreen Wittke,Andrea Haase,Andreas Grützkau,Sabine Flemig,Norbert Jakubowski,Wolfram Bremser,Sabine Baumgart,Andreas Luch

doi:10.1039/c7ja00395a

Abstract

A promising analytical methodology is proposed to study nanoparticle-cell interactions providing information of the number of NPs internalized by cells or externally bound to the cell surface.

Highlights

The impact of nanoparticles, NPs, on cells is a key question in biomedical applications as well as in nanotoxicology and numerous analytical methods such as uorescence and electron microscopy, mass spectrometry imaging, and mass and ow cytometric approaches have been applied to understand the extent and mode of cell–NP interactions.[1,2,3,4] such methodologies are still in their infancy to resolve cell-associated NP uptake and the analysis of NPs at the single cell level remains a challenge
We have seen for the rst time that some cells can have a signi cantly higher uptake rate compared to a mean value, and so even in low dose experiments a high number of NPs in cells are detected, a nding which is of signi cant toxicological relevance
Those individual cells which did not take up any AgNPs at all are not visible in the single cell experiment presented, but have been investigated using a mass cytometry approach in a separate study.[18]

Summary

Introduction

The impact of nanoparticles, NPs, on cells is a key question in biomedical applications as well as in nanotoxicology and numerous analytical methods such as uorescence and electron microscopy, mass spectrometry imaging, and mass and ow cytometric approaches have been applied to understand the extent and mode of cell–NP interactions.[1,2,3,4] such methodologies are still in their infancy to resolve cell-associated NP uptake and the analysis of NPs at the single cell level remains a challenge. Considering the number of detected cell events per time resolved ICP-MS pro le (roughly 500–700), the same parameters described for AgNP suspensions and a maximal cell concentration of 1 Â 105 cells mLÀ1, a similar transport efficiency value between 2 and 3% was estimated demonstrating that the size of the droplets generated by the nebulizer and not the size of cells is the limiting factor.

Results

Conclusion