Towards fabrication of corona-free nanoparticles

Abstract

The formation of a corona-free system of nanoparticles is an emerging field in nanoscience. When NPs are put into biological fluids, they gather a layer of biological material around them, called a "biological corona." This corona affects various biological processes, like how long the nanoparticles stay in circulation, how drugs are released from them, where they go in the body, and how they interact with cells inside the body. Because of these effects, AuNPs don't work as well as we'd like them to in things like delivering drugs to specific places, taking images inside the body, providing genes, and giving medicines. Various properties of gold nanoparticles and lipids have been extensively discussed in the literature up to this point. No report exists where aliphatic amino acid functionalized gold nanoparticles can form a stable and corona-free system. In our work, we aim to investigate the formation of the corona-free system on valine and isoleucine functionalized gold nanoparticles and to analyze how corona-free nanoparticles can boost their stability in the harsh environment of biological fluid. Our research findings indicate that gold nanoparticles functionalized with valine and isoleucine form a lipid corona, enhancing stability against external stimuli. These nanoparticles stabilize high-concentration favorable and zwitterionic lipid vesicles, whereas, at low concentrations, they undergo aggregation. The AuVal and AuILe NPs do not interact with negatively charged lipid vesicles, suggesting nanoparticles' negative surface charge. It has also been found that the nanoparticle's stability increases after the Lipid's coating around its Surface, i.e., lipid coating prevents nanoparticle aggregation in different environmental Conditions.