Monodisperse Au/aminosilica composite nanospheres: Facile one-step synthesis and their applications in gene transfection
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Tuck-yun Cheang, Shenming Wang, and Zuojun Hu Department of Vascular Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510080, China
Zhouhao Xing, Wengang Qu, and Anwu Xua) Division of Nanomaterials and Chemistry, Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China (Received 9 January 2012; accepted 30 May 2012)
In this study, Au/aminosilica composite nanospheres have been synthesized via a simple one-pot route using HAuCl4 and N-(3-trimethoxysilylpropyl)-ethylenediamine as starting materials. Scanning electron microscopy results show that these spheres are with diameters of about 300 nm. The obtained Au/aminosilica nanospheres were used as nonviral carriers for gene delivery. Compared with commercial Lipofectamine 2000, the Au/aminosilica nanospheres are with higher transfection efficiency and lower cytotoxicity. Furthermore, the nanospheres are biocompatible, which may find applications in gene delivery and drug carrier.
I. INTRODUCTION
Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) have been the subject of extensive research due to their various applications in catalysis, biology, sensing, electronics, and photonics.1–7 For example, it has been demonstrated that AuNPs could be used for delivery of genetic materials into cells through a biochemical strategy.8–12 A gene delivery system based on AuNPs could be especially attractive because the nanoparticles can be readily conjugated with targeting biomolecules as well as genes at high packing densities, which therefore facilitates high delivery efficiency and low enzymatic degradation of modified DNA strands.13–15 Moreover, AuNPs exhibit neither high toxicity nor strong immunogenicity.14,16–18 However, the applications of AuNPs in biomedicine are limited because of their low stability and solubility in aqueous media. So far, various AuNPs composite nanostructures such as core–shell,19–22 yolk–shell,23–25 and films26 have been prepared. Among these materials, AuNPs/SiO2 composites attract much more attention due to the growing interest of silica nanoparticles for biological applications. The general synthetic method is to encapsulate presynthesized AuNPs with SiO2 or deposit AuNPs on functionalized SiO2 nanoparticles to obtain amino-functionalized silica.27,28 Recent results show that silica nanoparticles, with ultralarge pore or surface functionalized by cationic amino a)
Address all correspondence to this author. e-mail: [email protected] DOI: 10.1557/jmr.2012.218 J. Mater. Res., Vol. 27, No. 18, Sep 28, 2012
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groups, not only can bind and protect plasmid DNA from enzymatic digestion but also can transfect cultured cells and express encoded proteins.29–32 Herein, we report a simple method for one-step synthesis of AuNPs/ aminosilica composite nanospheres from HAuCl4 and N-(3-trimethoxysilylpropyl)-ethylenediamine(TMSen)without using other reducing agents and stabilizers. In this process, TMSen acts as the reducing agent and th
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