Issue 1, 2016

Formation of supported lipid bilayers containing phase-segregated domains and their interaction with gold nanoparticles

Abstract

For nanoparticles that have been released into the environment, the cell membrane represents an initial site of interaction with eukaryotic cells. The encounter of nanoparticles with cellular membranes may alter membrane structure and function, lead to uptake into cells, or elicit adverse biological responses. Supported lipid bilayers have proven to be valuable ex vivo models for biological membranes, allowing investigation of their mechanisms of interaction with nanoparticles with a degree of control impossible in living cells. To date, the majority of research on nanoparticle interaction with supported lipid bilayers has employed membranes composed of single or binary mixtures of phospholipids. Cellular membranes contain a wide variety of lipids and exhibit lateral organization. Ordered membrane domains enriched in specific membrane components, also referred to as lipid rafts, have not been explored with respect to their interaction with nanoparticles. Here we develop model membranes containing segregated domains differing in fluidity that are amenable to investigation by a variety of surface-sensitive analytical techniques and demonstrate that these domains influence the extent of nanoparticle attachment to model membranes. We determined conditions that allow reliable formation of bilayers containing liquid-ordered domains enriched in sphingomyelin and cholesterol and confirmed their morphology by structured illumination and atomic force microscopies. We demonstrate that the presence of liquid-ordered domains increases attachment of cationic gold nanoparticles to model membranes relative to those lacking such domains under near physiological ionic strength conditions (0.1 M NaCl) at pH 7.4. We anticipate that these results will serve as the foundation for and motivate further study of nanoparticle interaction with phase-segregated domains.

Graphical abstract: Formation of supported lipid bilayers containing phase-segregated domains and their interaction with gold nanoparticles

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
07 may 2015
Accepted
21 sen 2015
First published
21 sen 2015
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Environ. Sci.: Nano, 2016,3, 45-55

Formation of supported lipid bilayers containing phase-segregated domains and their interaction with gold nanoparticles

E. S. Melby, A. C. Mensch, S. E. Lohse, D. Hu, G. Orr, C. J. Murphy, R. J. Hamers and J. A. Pedersen, Environ. Sci.: Nano, 2016, 3, 45 DOI: 10.1039/C5EN00098J

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements