A generally adoptable radiotracing method for tracking carbon nanotubes in animals
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Published on: July 17, 2012
Xiaoyong Deng1, Shengtao Yang, Haiyu Nie
1Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Department of Chemical Biology, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, People's Republic of China. Institute of Nanochemistry and Nanobiology, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, People's Republic of China.
Abstract:
Carbon nanotube (CNT) mediated drug delivery systems have currently aroused a great deal of interest. Such delivery systems for drugs, proteins and genes have been preliminarily studied using cellular and animal models. For the further study of the pharmacokinetics and related biological behaviours of CNTs in vivo, a fast and convenient tracing method is particularly demanded. In this paper, we developed a generally adoptable tracing method for the biodistribution study of functionalized CNTs in vivo. Taurine covalently functionalized multi-walled carbon nanotubes (tau-MWNTs) and Tween-80 wrapped MWNTs (Tween-MWNTs) were labelled with (125)I, and then their distribution in mice was determined. It is interesting that Tween-80 can reduce the RES uptake of MWNTs remarkably. The resulting distribution of (125)I-tau-MWNTs was very consistent with that using (14)C-taurine-MWNTs as the CNTs tracer, which means the easy (125)I labelling method is reliable and effective.
