Physiological Stability and Renal Clearance of Ultrasmall Zwitterionic Gold Nanoparticles: Ligand Length Matters

Date

2017-03-15

ORCID

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

American Institute of Physics

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Abstract

Efficient renal clearance has been observed from ultrasmall zwitterionic glutathione-coated gold nanoparticles (GS-AuNPs), which have broad preclinical applications in cancer diagnosis and kidney functional imaging. However, origin of such efficient renal clearance is still not clear. Herein, we conducted head-to-head comparison on physiological stability and renal clearance of two zwitterionic luminescent AuNPs coated with cysteine and glycine-cysteine (Cys-AuNPs and Gly-Cys-AuNPs), respectively. While both of them exhibited similar surface charges and the same core sizes, additional glycine slightly increased the hydrodynamic diameter of the AuNPs by 0.4 nm but significantly enhanced physiological stability of the AuNPs as well as altered their clearance pathways. These studies indicate that the ligand length, in addition to surface charges and size, also plays a key role in the physiological stability and renal clearance of ultrasmall zwitterionic inorganic NPs.

Description

Keywords

Glutathione, Ligands, Gold, Cysteine, Nanoparticles, Fluorescence, Metal coating, Polyelectrolytes, Hydrodynamics, Kidneys, Liver, Proteins

item.page.sponsorship

CPRIT (Nos. PR140544 and RP160866); NIH (No. 1R01DK103363).

Rights

CC BY 4.0 (Attribution), ©2017 The Authors

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