Dinger Nikita, Panzetta Valeria, Russo Carmela, Netti Paolo Antonio, Sirignano Mariano
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Chimica, dei Materiali e della Produzione Industriale, Università di Napoli Federico II, Napoli, Italy.
Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Biomaterials, CRIB, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy.
Nanotoxicology. 2022 Aug-Oct;16(6-8):733-756. doi: 10.1080/17435390.2022.2144775. Epub 2022 Nov 20.
Carbon nanomaterials are an inventive class of materials with wide applications in state-of-the-art bioimaging and therapeutics. They allow a broad range of tunable and integrated advantages of structural flexibility, chemical and thermal stability, upright electrical conductivity, and the option of scale-up and mass production. In the context of nanomedicine, carbon nanomaterials have been used extensively to mitigate the serious side effects of conventional chemotherapy and also to enable early cancer diagnostics, given their wide range of tunable properties. A class of carbon nanomaterials, called carbon dots (CDs) are small carbon-based nanoparticles and have been a valued discovery due to their photoluminescence, low photobleaching, and high surface area to mass ratio. The process of producing these CDs had so far been a high energy demanding process involving wet chemistry for purification. A one-step tunable production of luminescent CDs from fuel rich combustion reactors was recently presented by our group. In this paper, we explore the effects of these yellow luminescent combustion-generated CDs in MCF7 adenocarcinoma and MCF10a normal breast epithelial cells. We observed that these CDs, also at nontoxic doses, can affect basic cellular functions, such as cell cycle and proliferation; induce substantial changes on the physical parameters of the plasma membrane; and change the overall appearance of a cell in terms of morphology.
碳纳米材料是一类具有创新性的材料，在先进的生物成像和治疗领域有着广泛应用。它们具有一系列可调节的综合优势，包括结构灵活性、化学和热稳定性、良好的导电性，以及可扩大规模进行大规模生产。在纳米医学领域，鉴于其具有广泛的可调谐特性，碳纳米材料已被广泛用于减轻传统化疗的严重副作用，并实现癌症的早期诊断。一类被称为碳点（CDs）的碳纳米材料是基于碳的小纳米颗粒，由于其光致发光、低光漂白和高比表面积，它们是一项有价值的发现。到目前为止，生产这些碳点的过程一直是一个高能量需求的过程，涉及用于纯化的湿化学方法。我们团队最近提出了一种从富燃料燃烧反应器中一步可调谐生产发光碳点的方法。在本文中，我们探讨了这些黄色发光的燃烧产生的碳点对MCF7腺癌和MCF10a正常乳腺上皮细胞的影响。我们观察到，这些碳点即使在无毒剂量下，也会影响基本的细胞功能，如细胞周期和增殖；引起质膜物理参数的显著变化；并在形态方面改变细胞的整体外观。
