%0 Journal Article
%T Single-walled carbon nanotube interactions with HeLa cells
%A Hadi N Yehia
%A Rockford K Draper
%A Carole Mikoryak
%A Erin Walker
%A Pooja Bajaj
%A Inga H Musselman
%A Meredith C Daigrepont
%A Gregg R Dieckmann
%A Paul Pantano
%J Journal of Nanobiotechnology
%D 2007
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1477-3155-5-8
%X The structural and electronic properties of SWNTs lend themselves to a variety of biomedical applications involving the detection and treatment of diseases, most notably cancer [1-6]. For example, the structural change in DNA upon shifting from the B to Z conformation sufficiently perturbs the electronic structure of SWNTs such that the change can be detected optically from living cells that have taken up DNA-SWNT complexes [7]. This and other works demonstrate how CNTs can be used as sensors within living cells [8,9]. In another example, exposing cells containing SWNTs to near infrared radiation kills the cells due to the efficient optical-to-thermal energy conversion of SWNTs, demonstrating that they can potentially be used in targeted cancer therapies to eliminate cancer cells [10]. Finally, there are a number of reports that CNTs facilitate the transport of bound oligonucleotides, peptides, and proteins across the plasma membrane [1,11-19]. However, despite these and other intracellular applications not listed here, there remain technical challenges towards realizing the potential benefits of CNTs in biomedicine. Namely, CNTs are extremely hydrophobic, bundle together, and are insoluble in water.Two approaches have been used to modify the hydrophobic surface of CNTs to make them water soluble and biocompatible. The first has been to debundle and disperse CNTs in aqueous solution by covalently attaching water soluble substances to the CNT surface, and the second has involved the noncovalent association of material to the CNT surface [20-26]. In both approaches, a wide variety of organic adducts and biological materials have been used successfully including oligonucleotides [7,9,10,15,17,18,27-40], peptides [14,19,41-52], proteins [8,11-13,16,53-59] (most notably, bovine serum albumin (BSA) [60-63]), an assortment of polymers [64], and various cell culture media formulations [19,43,65-72]. While covalently attaching material to CNTs is advantageous for many applic
%U http://www.jnanobiotechnology.com/content/5/1/8