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Updated: Oct 16, 2025
Synthesis, Functionalization, and Characterization of Fusogenic Porous Silicon Nanoparticles for Oligonucleotide Delivery
Published on: April 16, 2019
Asymmetric Silica Nanoparticles with Tailored Spiky Coverage Derived from Silica-Polymer Cooperative Assembly for
Xiuzhen Lin1,2, Weixi Wu2, Jianye Fu2
1School of Materials Science and Engineering, Dongguan University of Technology, Dongguan, Guangdong 523808, China.
Abstract:
Asymmetric mesoporous silica nanoparticles (AMSNs) with one side featuring a spiky nanotopography, while the other side is smooth and solid, were synthesized via an ethylenediamine (EDA)-directed silica-polymer cooperative assembly approach. By simply varying the EDA amount (x), AMSNs-x samples with adjustable spiky surface coverage were obtained. It is demonstrated that a spiky coverage higher than 50% improved the hemocompatibility of AMSN-x, possibly due to the reduced contact area of the smooth side exposed to the red blood cell (RBC) membrane. Moreover, AMSNs-175 and AMSNs-200 with high spiky coverage enhanced their plasmid DNA (pDNA) loading and binding capability, as well as cellular uptake into HEK-293T cells, thus resulting in high transfection performance. The good hemocompatibility and high performance in pDNA delivery of AMSNs-x with high spiky coverage allow them to serve as promising nonviral vectors for potential applications in gene therapies and DNA vaccines.
