Gold nanoparticles have found many uses in biomedicine, opening doors in imaging modalities, hyperthermia, and drug delivery, among others. The high degree of control over their physical properties and their surface functionalization allows one to produce a library of nanoparticles for labelling purposes, taking advantage of their plasmonic and Raman signal-enhancing effects for local heating and Raman-microscopy respectively. We are interested in the use of such nanoparticles to label both biological and non-biological 3D structures, printed using 3D printing or produced with bottom-up methods. This includes a wide range of systems such as the growth of living cells in defined morphologies due to their natural predisposition (layered or spherical forms), 3D printing of living cells embedded in biological gels, 3D printing of nanoparticle containing inks etc. Our goal is to be able to use the defined nanoparticles as combined sensors and “GPS” tags, thereby giving biological information with a precise localisation in a complex 3D system.<br/>We have focused on gold nanostars and nanorods as two different nanostructures with highly defined plasmonic properties, both of which can be also surface functionalised to have opposing surface charges. Additional nanostructures and material composition can also be used to increase the library of nanoparticles (for examples nanospheres, incorporation of iron oxide nanoparticles or silver doping, etc). As for the cellular system, we have used cell combinations which aim to recreate aspects of the <i>in vivo</i> environment, such as heterotypic cell mixtures or 3D cell growth. The results presented will aim to highlight the flexibility of such nanoparticles for multimodal 3D imaging and sensing.

Gold nanoparticle imaging in complex mammalian cell cultures

2019 Spring National Meeting

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