Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Nanophotonic Functional Materials and Devices, School of Information and Optoelectronic Science and Engineering, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006, China.
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Nanophotonic Functional Materials and Devices, School of Information and Optoelectronic Science and Engineering, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006, China.
Colloids Surf B Biointerfaces. 2018 Mar 1;163:47-54. doi: 10.1016/j.colsurfb.2017.12.027. Epub 2017 Dec 15.
We proposed the use of copper (Cu) doping to modify the mechanical properties of gold nanorods (AuNRs) and demonstrated the triggering of the cytotoxicity of Cu-doped AuNRs with ultrasonic wave. The mechanical properties of Cu-doped AuNRs were analyzed theoretically by using the density-function calculation and it was found that Cu-Au bond is much weaker than Au-Au bond. In experiments, AuNRs without and with Cu doping were synthesized and they were found to be low cytotoxic to both human liver hepatocellular carcinoma (HepG2) cells and normal liver cells (L02). It was found that Cu-doped AuNRs can be broken into small gold nanoparticles (<5 nm) under high-power ultrasonic wave while undoped AuNRs were quite stable, although the amount of Cu doped into AuNRs was quite small (0.2%). The small gold nanoparticles are found to be with high toxicity to HepG2 cells. The cellular viability of the HepG2 cells dropped to nearly zero after being incubated with Cu-doped AuNRs (50 nM), which had been treated with a 300-W ultrasonic wave. Our findings suggest a novel method for modifying the mechanical properties of AuNRs and especially for triggering their cytotoxicity which is quite useful for in vitro therapy of cancer cells.
我们提出使用铜（Cu）掺杂来修饰金纳米棒（AuNRs）的机械性能，并证明了超声触发 Cu 掺杂 AuNRs 的细胞毒性。通过使用密度泛函计算对 Cu 掺杂 AuNRs 的机械性能进行了理论分析，发现 Cu-Au 键比 Au-Au 键弱得多。在实验中，合成了没有掺杂和掺杂 Cu 的 AuNRs，发现它们对人肝癌细胞（HepG2）和正常肝细胞（L02）的细胞毒性都很低。结果发现，Cu 掺杂的 AuNRs 在高功率超声波下可以被分解成小金纳米颗粒（<5nm），而未掺杂的 AuNRs 非常稳定，尽管 AuNRs 中掺杂的 Cu 量很小（0.2%）。小金纳米颗粒对 HepG2 细胞具有高毒性。用 300-W 超声波处理后，用 50nM 的 Cu 掺杂的 AuNRs（50nM）孵育后，HepG2 细胞的细胞活力几乎降至零。我们的研究结果表明了一种修饰 AuNRs 机械性能的新方法，特别是触发其细胞毒性的方法，这对癌细胞的体外治疗非常有用。
