Centre for BioNano Interactions, School of Chemistry , University College Dublin , Belfield, Dublin 4 , Ireland.
FOCAS Research Institute , Technological University Dublin , Kevin Street , Dublin 8 , Ireland.
Nano Lett. 2019 Feb 13;19(2):1260-1268. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b04820. Epub 2019 Jan 16.
The biological interactions of graphene have been extensively investigated over the last 10 years. However, very little is known about graphene interactions with the cell surface and how the graphene internalization process is driven and mediated by specific recognition sites at the interface with the cell. In this work, we propose a methodology to investigate direct molecular correlations between the biomolecular corona of graphene and specific cell receptors, showing that key protein recognition motifs, presented on the nanomaterial surface, can engage selectively with specific cell receptors. We consider the case of apolipoprotein A-I, found to be very abundant in the graphene protein corona, and observe that the uptake of graphene nanoflakes is somewhat increased in cells with greatly elevated expression of scavenger receptors B1, suggesting a possible mechanism of endogenous interaction. The uptake results, obtained by flow cytometry, have been confirmed using Raman microspectroscopic mapping, exploiting the strong Raman signature of graphene.
在过去的 10 年中，人们对石墨烯的生物相互作用进行了广泛的研究。然而，对于石墨烯与细胞表面的相互作用以及石墨烯的内化过程如何通过与细胞界面的特定识别位点来驱动和介导，我们知之甚少。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种方法来研究石墨烯的生物分子冠层与特定细胞受体之间的直接分子相关性，表明纳米材料表面上存在的关键蛋白质识别基序可以与特定的细胞受体选择性地结合。我们以载脂蛋白 A-I 为例，它在石墨烯的蛋白质冠层中含量非常丰富，并且观察到在 scavenger 受体 B1 表达水平大大提高的细胞中，石墨烯纳米薄片的摄取量略有增加，这表明可能存在内源性相互作用的机制。通过流式细胞术获得的摄取结果已使用 Raman 微光谱映射得到证实，该方法利用了石墨烯的强拉曼特征。
