Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112, United States.
ACS Nano. 2010 Nov 23;4(11):6982-8. doi: 10.1021/nn102106f. Epub 2010 Nov 4.
Quantitative techniques are essential to analyze the structure of soft multicomponent nanobioclusters. Here, we combine electrospray differential mobility analysis (ES-DMA), which rapidly measures the size of the entire cluster, with transmission electron microscopy (TEM), which detects the hard components, to determine the presence and composition of the softer components. Coupling analysis of TEM and ES-DMA derived data requires the creation and use of analytical models to determine the size and number of constituents in nanoparticle complexes from the difference between the two measurements. Previous ES-DMA analyses have been limited to clusters of identical spherical particles. Here, we dramatically extend the ES-DMA analysis framework to accommodate more challenging geometries, including protein corona-coated nanorods, clusters composed of heterogeneously sized nanospheres, and nanobioclusters composed of both nanospheres and nanorods. The latter is critical to determining the number of quantum dots attached to lambda (λ) phage, a key element of a rapid method to detect bacterial pathogens in environmental and clinical samples.
定量技术对于分析软多组分纳米生物簇的结构至关重要。在这里，我们将快速测量整个簇大小的电喷雾差分迁移率分析（ES-DMA）与检测硬组分的透射电子显微镜（TEM）相结合，以确定较软组分的存在和组成。TEM 和 ES-DMA 衍生数据的耦合分析需要创建和使用分析模型，以便根据两种测量之间的差异来确定纳米颗粒复合物中组成部分的大小和数量。以前的 ES-DMA 分析仅限于相同球形颗粒的簇。在这里，我们将 ES-DMA 分析框架大大扩展，以适应更具挑战性的几何形状，包括涂有蛋白质外壳的纳米棒、由不同尺寸的纳米球组成的簇，以及由纳米球和纳米棒组成的纳米生物簇。后者对于确定附着在 lambda（λ）噬菌体上的量子点数量至关重要，lambda 噬菌体是一种快速检测环境和临床样本中细菌病原体的方法的关键元素。
