With the fast development of nanotechnology and the more and more severe air pollution problems caused by airborne particulate matter, the negative impact of inhaled nanoparticles or aerosols to the human health has attracted a lot of public attentions. One of the important research topics is to understand how the nanoparticles penetrate the biological membranes on a molecular level. The monolayer of pulmonary surfactant is the first biological barrier in the respiratory system to defend against inhaled aerosols and nanoparticles. In this presentation, we will demonstrate our recent work in which the vibrational sum frequency generation vibrational spectroscopy (VSFG) was employed to investigate the interactions between the synthetic nanoparticles and the model system of pulmonary surfactant at the air/water interface. As a surface-selective and sub-monolayer sensitive second nonlinear optical tools, the polarization-dependent VSFG was used to probe the changes of molecular orientations, interfacial assembly structures of the phospholipid Langmuir monolayers caused by the addition of synthetic hematite or polymer nanoparticles. The model  pulmonary surfactant systems that have been investigated include a variety of phospholipid molecules with different hydrophilic head groups such as dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC), dipalmitoylphosphatidylglycerol (DPPG) and dipalmitoylphosphatidylserine (DPPS).The atomic force microscopy (AFM) and surface pressure-area (π-A) isotherm measurements were also employed to help elucidate the mechanisms of nanoparticle-biomembrane interactions. These experimental results demonstrate that the VSFG is a versatile and powerful optical tool to investigate the nano-bio interfaces.<br/>

Probing interactions between synthetic nanoparticles and model systems of pulmonary surfactant by vibrational sum frequency generation spectroscopy

255th National Meeting (2018)

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