Scientists develop new nanotech approach

“This research brings more efficiency to the measurement and detection of the mass changes of a cell as a result of malignancy or the uptake of nano-particles,” said the first author of the study, Lin Huan-Chang of the Department of Bio-Industrial Mechatronics Engineering at National Taiwan University.

“The spectrometer called the Charge-Monitoring Mass Spectrometer (CMS) is proven to be useful in streamlining the determination the quantity of both gold and polystyrene nano-particles taken up into cells. We expect that such device will be of importance in medical applications,” he said.

Nano-particles have been pursued by researchers in recent years as possible carriers for drug delivery, according to scientists. Therefore, effective quantitative measurement of the cellular uptake of nano-particles is of great importance.

These tiny particles are measured using various types of mass spectrometry (an analytical technique for the determination of the elemental composition of a sample or molecule). However, these methods are limited to elemental particles such as gold.

The Taiwanese scientists used a different type of spectrometer called CMS, a device that was developed by a group at the Genomics Research Center (GRC) and the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences at Academia Sinica in 2007, to measure single cancer cells at higher speeds, according to the press release.

The group's findings indicate that CMS is effective for measuring nano-gold uptake by cells. The also found that CMS can measure particles over a much larger size range.

In addition, as CMS only takes two steps to examine the nano-gold compared to other methods that can take five steps, CMS is more time-efficient, the scientists said.

Most importantly, CMS can also measure non-metal nano-particles, including polymeric nano-particles, carbon nanotubes, diamond nano-particles, viruses, micelles and liposomes, the press release said.

The full text of the study, titled “Quantitative Measurement of Nano-/Microparticle Endocytosis by Cell Mass Spectrometry” was published online April 13 in the leading international journal “Angewandte Chemie.”

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