Abstract
Superparamagnetic iron oxide (SPIO) nanoparticles have been widely used in a variety of biomedical applications, especially as contrast agents for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and cell labeling. In this study, SPIO nanoparticles were stabilized with amphiphilic low molecular weight polyethylenimine (PEI) in an aqueous phase to form monodispersed nanocomposites with a controlled clustering structure. The iron-based nanoclusters with a size of 115.3 ± 40.23 nm showed excellent performance on cellular uptake and cell labeling in different types of cells, moreover, which could be tracked by MRI with high sensitivity. The SPIO nanoclusters presented negligible cytotoxicity in various types of cells as detected using MTS, LDH, and flow cytometry assays. Significantly, we found that ferritin protein played an essential role in protecting stress from SPIO nanoclusters. Taken together, the self-assembly of SPIO nanoclusters with good magnetic properties provides a safe and efficient method for universal cell labeling with noninvasive MRI monitoring capability.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s11671-016-1479-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Molecular imaging, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), plays an important role in molecular or individual medicine, which enables us to visualize the molecular targets and diagnose complex diseases noninvasively [1, 2]
Synthesis and Characterization of Superparamagnetic iron oxide (SPIO) Nanoclusters Our previous studies showed that the amphiphilic polycation PEI coated dozens of SPIO nanoclusters into a cluster which presented higher MRI sensitivity [25]
In the present study, we developed SPIO nanoclusters consisting of iron oxide core wrapped within Alkyl-PEI
Summary
Molecular imaging, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), plays an important role in molecular or individual medicine, which enables us to visualize the molecular targets and diagnose complex diseases noninvasively [1, 2]. Traditional MRI suffers from low sensitivity, and the introduction of contrast agents is needed for histopathological examination and cell labeling and tracking [3]. To improve the efficiency of SPIO nanoparticles labeling cells, much effort on modification have been conducted, such as linking peptides or antibodies to the surface of SPIO nanoparticles [13,14,15,16]. These approaches have some shortcomings, such as complexity of modifying procedures or low availability of cell labeling. We hypothesized that amphiphilic low molecular weight PEI modified SPIO nanoclusters might
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