Cai Qi, Castagnola Valentina, Boselli Luca, Moura Alirio, Lopez Hender, Zhang Wei, de Araújo João M, Dawson Kenneth A
Centre for BioNano Interactions, School of Chemistry, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.
Departamento de Física Teórica e Experimental, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, 59078-970, Natal, RN, Brazil.
Nanoscale Horiz. 2022 Feb 28;7(3):288-298. doi: 10.1039/d1nh00540e.
Automatized approaches for nanoparticle synthesis and characterization represent a great asset to their applicability in the biomedical field by improving reproducibility and standardization, which help to meet the selection criteria of regulatory authorities. The scaled-up production of nanoparticles with carefully defined characteristics, including intrinsic morphological features, and minimal intra-batch, batch-to-batch, and operator variability, is an urgent requirement to elevate nanotechnology towards more trustable biological and technological applications. In this work, microfluidic approaches were employed to achieve fast mixing and good reproducibility in synthesizing a variety of gold nanostructures. The microfluidic setup allowed exploiting spatial resolution to investigate the growth evolution of the complex nanoarchitectures. By physically isolating intermediate reaction fractions, we performed an advanced characterization of the shape properties during their growth, not possible with routine characterization methods. Employing an in-house developed method to assign a specific identity to shapes, we followed the particle growth/deformation process and identified key reaction parameters for more precise control of the generated morphologies. Besides, this investigation led to the optimization of a one-pot multi-size and multi-shape synthesis of a variety of gold nanoparticles. In summary, we describe an optimized platform for highly controlled synthesis and a novel approach for the mechanistic study of shape-evolving nanomaterials.
纳米颗粒合成与表征的自动化方法通过提高可重复性和标准化，成为其在生物医学领域应用的一大优势，有助于满足监管机构的选择标准。大规模生产具有精确界定特征的纳米颗粒，包括内在形态特征，且批次内、批次间和操作人员差异最小，是将纳米技术提升至更可靠的生物和技术应用的迫切需求。在这项工作中，采用微流控方法在合成多种金纳米结构时实现快速混合和良好的可重复性。微流控装置允许利用空间分辨率来研究复杂纳米结构的生长演变。通过物理分离中间反应组分，我们对其生长过程中的形状特性进行了先进的表征，这是常规表征方法无法实现的。采用自行开发的方法为形状赋予特定标识，我们跟踪了颗粒的生长/变形过程，并确定了关键反应参数，以更精确地控制所生成的形态。此外，这项研究还优化了一锅法合成多种尺寸和形状的金纳米颗粒。总之，我们描述了一个用于高度可控合成的优化平台以及一种用于形状演变纳米材料机理研究的新方法。
