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Updated: Dec 8, 2025
Microglia as a Surrogate Biosensor to Determine Nanoparticle Neurotoxicity
Published on: October 25, 2016
Mitigation of Carbon Nanotube Neurosensor Induced Transcriptomic and Morphological Changes in Mouse Microglia with
Darwin Yang1, Sarah J Yang1, Jackson Travis Del Bonis-O'Donnell1
1Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, United States.
Abstract:
Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) are used in neuroscience for deep-brain imaging, neuron activity recording, measuring brain morphology, and imaging neuromodulation. However, the extent to which SWCNT-based probes impact brain tissue is not well understood. Here, we study the impact of (GT)6-SWCNT dopamine nanosensors on SIM-A9 mouse microglial cells and show SWCNT-induced morphological and transcriptomic changes in these brain immune cells. Next, we introduce a strategy to passivate (GT)6-SWCNT nanosensors with PEGylated phospholipids to improve both biocompatibility and dopamine imaging quality. We apply these passivated dopamine nanosensors to image electrically stimulated striatal dopamine release in acute mouse brain slices, and show that slices labeled with passivated nanosensors exhibit higher fluorescence response to dopamine and measure more putative dopamine release sites. Hence, this facile modification to SWCNT-based dopamine probes provides immediate improvements to both biocompatibility and dopamine imaging functionality with an approach that is readily translatable to other SWCNT-based neurotechnologies.
