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Refinement of the water‐in‐oil reverse microemulsion process for the encapsulation of proteins within silica nanoparticles
Author(s) -
Strong Elijah W,
Tarnai Brian D,
Anderson C. William
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.2019.33.1_supplement.785.10
Subject(s) - nanoparticle , microemulsion , biocompatibility , nanotechnology , chemistry , drug delivery , mesoporous silica , encapsulation (networking) , nanomaterials , chemical engineering , materials science , mesoporous material , biochemistry , organic chemistry , catalysis , computer science , pulmonary surfactant , computer network , engineering
Over the past decade, interest in nanoparticles as a therapeutic tool has skyrocketed as technological advances have made them cheaper and easier to use. Nanoparticles in themselves act as vehicles for proteins, enzymes, drugs, etc. and carry them throughout a biological system to a specific target. However, with proteins being simply bound to the nanoparticles, problems arise with these proteins being susceptible to denaturation. Encapsulation of proteins within nanoparticles provides an advantage over simple binding and gives many benefits through its protection of the proteins. Through encapsulation, proteins are protected by, in this case, a silica shell. This shell prevents the protein from denaturing from heat, acidity, or metabolism. All the while, the drug or enzyme that is encapsulated should still maintain its function and interact with a target site because the silica shell contains small pores that allow for such reactions to proceed. To establish and refine the encapsulation protocol in the context of our laboratory, we attempted a water‐in‐oil reverse microemulsion process on myoglobin, green fluorescent protein (GFP), and chymotrypsin. Since silica nanoparticles have been shown to be biocompatible in humans and have a great deal of biological significance, we chose to use a silica‐based approach for nanoparticle synthesis. The silica nanoparticles that we synthesized were mesoporous, which allowed the nanoparticles to be biocompatible due to their low hemolytic activity. Due to such biocompatibility, these nanoparticles can be used for things such as drug delivery, biosensors, imaging, and more. Results showed that encapsulation was successful through spectrophotometry absorbance and fluorescent microscopy measurements for myoglobin and GFP encapsulation, respectively. The catalytic function of the encapsulated proteins was then shown through absorbance experiments run on encapsulated chymotrypsin. Current work is focusing on using these techniques for the encapsulation of several clinically relevant protein targets of similar size to the examples presented here. Support or Funding Information National Science Foundation Award #1626602 This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .