Abstract
Alumina is one of the most promising carriers for drug delivery due to the long history of its usage as a vaccine adjuvant. Sol-gel synthesis provides excellent conditions for entrapment of biomolecules within an inorganic cage providing stabilization of proteins under the extremal conditions. In this paper, we show in vitro investigation of monodisperse alumina xerogel nanocontainers (AXNCs) using bovine serum albumin as a model protein entrapped in sol-gel alumina building blocks. Particularly, dose and cell-type dependent cytotoxicity in HeLa and A549 cancer cell lines were employed as well as investigation of antibacterial effect and stability of AXNCs in different biological media. It was shown, that the release of entrapped protein could be provided only in low pH buffer (as in cancer cell cytoplasm). This property could be applied for anticancer drug development. We also discovered boehmite nanoparticles effect on horizontal gene transfer and observed the appearance of antibiotic resistance by means of exchanging of the corresponding plasmid between two different E. coli strains. The present work may help to understand better the influence of AXNCs on various biological systems, such as prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, and the activity of AXNCs in different biological media.
Highlights
Targeted drug delivery systems gained much attention in past decades due to the necessity of enhancing treatment efficacy of socially significant diseases[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
HRTEM images of boehmite xerogel (Fig. 1c) and bovine serum albumin (BSA)@alumina xerogel nanocontainers (AXNCs) (Fig. 1f) show almost identical textural properties, which were reflected in the data of nitrogen physisorption
AXNCs, which consisted of boehmite building blocks, can be employed as the drug carriers with significant thermo- and chemoprotective properties
Summary
Textural properties of boehmite NPs and AXNCs. It should be noted, that the developed technique of obtaining of nanocrystalline AlOOH sol in aqueous solution under ultrasonic treatment implies the use of near-neutral pH values, which are comfortable for biomolecules and correspond to the range, where an optimal entrapment can be achieved. A dose-dependent change in Y value for AXNCs and especially for pure boehmite NPs indicates the decrease in the absolute number of cells in the analyzed samples after 72 hours of incubation with nanoparticles. According to the obtained results, boehmite NPs decreased the number of detected cells much more in comparison with AXNCs and BSA@AXNCs in all observed concentrations. It means the increase of the intensity of Rhodamine B fluorescence in the cells incubated with nanoparticles, which suggests about the permeability of RdB@AXNCs to cancer cells of the A549 line. According to the obtained results, we detected two independent pieces of evidence, that the RhB@AXNCs penetrated into the A549 cells
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