Silica nanoparticles are less toxic to human lung cells when deposited at the air–liquid interface compared to conventional submerged exposure

• Alicja Panas,
• Andreas Comouth,
• Harald Saathoff,
• Thomas Leisner,
• Marco Al-Rawi,
• Michael Simon,
• Gunnar Seemann,
• Olaf Dössel,
• Sonja Mülhopt,
• Hanns-Rudolf Paur,
• Susanne Fritsch-Decker,
• Carsten Weiss and
• Silvia Diabaté

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2014, 5, 1590–1602, doi:10.3762/bjnano.5.171

• phosphorylation was detected after 7 h of exposure whereas LDH and IL-8 release were monitored after 24 h, a more detailed kinetic analysis is needed to substantiate a possibly different regulation of this biomarker in response to SiO2-50 nm NPs. Our studies on the biological effects of Aerosil200 under submerged

The softening of human bladder cancer cells happens at an early stage of the malignancy process

• Jorge R. Ramos,
• Joanna Pabijan,
• Ricardo Garcia and
• Malgorzata Lekka

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2014, 5, 447–457, doi:10.3762/bjnano.5.52

• -malignant cells. This underlines the diagnostic character of stiffness that can be used as a biomarker of bladder cancer. Similar stiffness levels, observed for cancerous cells, cannot be fully explained by the organization of the actin cytoskeleton since it is different in all malignant cells. Our results

• progression. This makes the cell stiffness a powerful biomarker for detecting cancer-related alterations in human bladder tumors. Conclusion Nanomechanical measurements performed with a force microscope at the single cell level have been applied to characterize the elastic properties of human bladder cancer

Magnetic nanoparticles for biomedical NMR-based diagnostics

• Huilin Shao,
• Tae-Jong Yoon,
• Monty Liong,
• Ralph Weissleder and
• Hakho Lee

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2010, 1, 142–154, doi:10.3762/bjnano.1.17

• -assembled clusters, and the consequent increase in cross-sectional area of the particles shortens T2 relaxation times. DMR assay configurations Analogous to MRI, DMR exploits targeted MNPs to modulate the spin–spin T2 relaxation time of biological samples. Depending on the size of the target biomarker, DMR

• antibodies/nanoparticles resulted in higher nanoparticle binding to cells. In comparison to alternative standard techniques, such as the avidin/biotin method, BOND-2 not only amplifies the biomarker signals but also significantly improves the detection sensitivity. Moreover, this platform is broadly

• bovine serum albumin (BSA) protein as a control did not elicit any change in T2 (Figure 5b). More recently, MRSw biosensors, capable of detecting soluble tumor biomarker proteins (such as CA-125, VEGF, and α-fetoprotein) were described, and used for parallel detection of multiple markers in blood samples