The investigation of the toxicological profile and biomedical application of nanoparticles (NPs) requires deep understanding of their intracellular fate. Various techniques are usually employed to characterize NPs upon cellular internalization, including high-resolution optical and electron microscopies. Here, we show a new method, named sputtering-enabled intracellular XPS (SEI-XPS), proving that it is able to provide valuable information about the behavior of metallic NPs in culture media as well as within cells, directly measuring their internalization, stability/degradation, and oxidation state, without any preparative steps. The technique can also provide nanometer-scale vertical resolution along with semi-quantitative information about the cellular internalization of the metallic species. The proposed approach is easy-to-use and can become a standard technique in nanotoxicology/nanomedicine and in the rational design of metallic NPs. Two model cases were investigated: silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) and platinum nanoparticles (PtNPs) of same size and coating. We observed that, after 48 hours incubation, intracellular AgNPs are almost completely dissolved, forming nanoclusters as well as Ag-O and Ag-S complexes. On the other hand, PtNPs are resistant to the harsh endo-lysosomal environment, and only some surface oxidation was detected after 48 hours.<br/><br/>

Sputtering-enabled intracellular X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (SEI-XPS): New lab-based technique to investigate the biological fate of metal nanoparticles

2019 Fall National Meeting

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