Gold nanostar particles are advantageous as probes of biological interactions because they are anisotropic in shape, electron-dense, and facile carriers of bio-functional ligands. Therefore, gold nanostars can provide snapshot information of particle-cell interactions using transmission electron microscopy as well as real-time tracking of intracellular interactions. This talk will describe how gold nanostars can be used as a nanoscale probe to resolve how oligonucleotide drugs interact with the cancer cell nucleus. We found that aptamer drugs grafted to the surface of the nanostars could bind to a cell-surface marker and shuttling protein for transport near the nucleus. The drugs were found to produce severe, local changes in nuclear phenotype based on the location of the drug-loaded nanostars. We will also discuss how gold nanostars grafted with Gd-bound DNA exhibit unusually high T1 relaxivity values compared to commercial agents. We found that the response of gold nanostar constructs exceeded that of spherical particles, which indicates that particle shape plays a critical role in achieving high performance contrast agents.

Gold nanostar probes for imaging and therapeutics

248th National Meeting (2014)

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