Issue 7, 2020

Four-wave-mixing microscopy reveals non-colocalisation between gold nanoparticles and fluorophore conjugates inside cells

Abstract

Gold nanoparticles have been researched for many biomedical applications in diagnostics, theranostics, and as drug delivery systems. When conjugated to fluorophores, their interaction with biological cells can be studied in situ and real time using fluorescence microscopy. However, an important question that has remained elusive to answer is whether the fluorophore is a faithful reporter of the nanoparticle location. Here, our recently developed four-wave-mixing optical microscopy is applied to image individual gold nanoparticles and in turn investigate their co-localisation with fluorophores inside cells. Nanoparticles from 10 nm to 40 nm diameter were conjugated to fluorescently-labeled transferrin, for internalisation via clathrin-mediated endocytosis, or to non-targeting fluorescently-labelled antibodies. Human (HeLa) and murine (3T3-L1) cells were imaged at different time points after incubation with these conjugates. Our technique identified that, in most cases, fluorescence originated from unbound fluorophores rather than from fluorophores attached to nanoparticles. Fluorescence detection was also severely limited by photobleaching, quenching and autofluorescence background. Notably, correlative extinction/fluorescence microscopy of individual particles on a glass surface indicated that commercial constructs contain large amounts of unbound fluorophores. These findings highlight the potential problems of data interpretation when reliance is solely placed on the detection of fluorescence within the cell, and are of significant importance in the context of correlative light electron microscopy.

Graphical abstract: Four-wave-mixing microscopy reveals non-colocalisation between gold nanoparticles and fluorophore conjugates inside cells

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
03 Oct 2019
Accepted
21 Dec 2019
First published
11 Feb 2020
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Nanoscale, 2020,12, 4622-4635

Four-wave-mixing microscopy reveals non-colocalisation between gold nanoparticles and fluorophore conjugates inside cells

N. Giannakopoulou, J. B. Williams, P. R. Moody, E. J. Sayers, J. P. Magnusson, I. Pope, L. Payne, C. Alexander, A. T. Jones, W. Langbein, P. Watson and P. Borri, Nanoscale, 2020, 12, 4622 DOI: 10.1039/C9NR08512B

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