The origin of heterogeneous nanoparticle uptake by cells

Paul Rees (), John W. Wills (), M. Rowan Brown, Claire M. Barnes and Huw D. Summers
Additional contact information
Paul Rees: Swansea University College of Engineering, Fabian Way
John W. Wills: Cambridge University Department of Veterinary Medicine, School of Biological Sciences
M. Rowan Brown: Swansea University College of Engineering, Fabian Way
Claire M. Barnes: Swansea University College of Engineering, Fabian Way
Huw D. Summers: Swansea University College of Engineering, Fabian Way

Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Understanding nanoparticle uptake by biological cells is fundamentally important to wide-ranging fields from nanotoxicology to drug delivery. It is now accepted that the arrival of nanoparticles at the cell is an extremely complicated process, shaped by many factors including unique nanoparticle physico-chemical characteristics, protein-particle interactions and subsequent agglomeration, diffusion and sedimentation. Sequentially, the nanoparticle internalisation process itself is also complex, and controlled by multiple aspects of a cell’s state. Despite this multitude of factors, here we demonstrate that the statistical distribution of the nanoparticle dose per endosome is independent of the initial administered dose and exposure duration. Rather, it is the number of nanoparticle containing endosomes that are dependent on these initial dosing conditions. These observations explain the heterogeneity of nanoparticle delivery at the cellular level and allow the derivation of simple, yet powerful probabilistic distributions that accurately predict the nanoparticle dose delivered to individual cells across a population.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10112-4 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:10:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-019-10112-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-10112-4

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().