Not all cells are created equal - endosomal escape in fluorescent nanodiamonds in different cells

Successful delivery of fluorescent nanodiamonds (FNDs) into the cytoplasm is essential to many biological applications. Other applications require FNDs to stay within the endosomes. The diversity of cellular uptake of FNDs and following endosomal escape are less explored. In this article, we quantify particle uptake at a single cell level. We report that FNDs enter into the cells gradually. The number of internalized FNDs per cell differs significantly for the cell lines we investigated at the same incubation time. In HeLa cells we do not see any significant endosomal escape. We also found a wide distribution of FND endosomal escape efficiency within the same cell type. However, compared with HeLa cells, FNDs in HUVECs can easily escape from the endosomes and less than 25% FNDs remained in the vesicles after 4 h incubation time. We believe this work can bring more attention to the diversity of the cells and provide potential guidelines for future studies.