News Section | Nanobiotechnology
Nanoparticles not as effective in protecting frozen cells as CPAs
June 15 : A new study has found that nanoparticles are not as effective in protecting frozen cells as the more traditional cryoprotective agents, or CPAs.
The study investigated the complex effects of gold-based nanoparticles on cell freezing, to test whether they can be replaced by cryoprotective agents that are used to alleviate freezing injury.
The study was conducted by a team of researchers including Ram Devireddy, Todd Monroe, Sreedhar Thirumala and Julianne Audiffred at Louisiana State University.
As part of the study, researchers tested the hypothesis whether nanoparticles would alleviate the damaging effects generally caused by the freezing process, as they believed that nanoparticles might act as a benign replacement for CPAs.
The researchers used the commercially available gold nanoparticles to replace dimethylsulfoxide, a commonly used cryoprotective agent to HeLa and Jurkat cells suspended in a culture medium.
HeLa cells are derived from a specific cervical cancer cell line and Jurkat cells are cancer cells commonly used in research due to their abnormally rapid growth rate in lab conditions.
“Cryoprotective agents, or CPAs, have long been used to alleviate freezing injury and to enhance the number of cells that survive the freezing process,” Thirumala said.
The drawback of CPAs is that they can also cause cell death when used in high concentrations and need to be removed from cells immediately after freezing.
Researchers found that contrary to the hypothesis nanoparticles did not significantly change the freezing response of either HeLa cells or Jurkat cells.
Although the study showed that the nanoparticles were not as effective in protecting frozen cells as the more traditional CPAs, there was significant damaging interaction between the nanoparticles and both HeLa and Jurkat cells, suggesting the need for more research which requires improved cryosurgical procedures, which are non-invasive procedures used to eradicate cancer tumours inside the body by cooling them to extremely low temperatures.
The findings of the study were published in the journal Nanotechnology. (ANI)
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