Exploring geometric properties of gold nanoparticles using TEM images to explain their chaperone like activity for...

Study on geometric properties of nanoparticles and their relation with biomolecular activities, especially protein is quite a new field to explore. This work was carried out towards this direction where images of gold nanoparticles obtained from transmission electron microscopy were processed to extract their size and area profile at different experimental conditions including and excluding a protein, citrate synthase. Since the images were ill-posed, texture of a context-window for each pixel was used as input to a back-propagation network architecture to obtain decision on its membership as nanoparticle. The segmented images were further analysed by k-means clustering to derive geometric properties of individual nanoparticles even from their assembled form. The extracted geometric information was found to be crucial to give a model featuring porous cage like configuration of nanoparticle assembly using which the chaperone like activity of gold nanoparticles can be explained.