Borrowing from a Nobel Prize-winning technique credited with starting the nanotechnology revolution, a team of researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Northwestern University's Nanomaterials for Cancer Diagnostics and Therapeutics has developed a method for imaging nanoparticles inside of cells.
This technique should prove useful for studies of nanomaterials toxicology as well as those designed to improve nanoparticle-based drug delivery. This work has been published online in advance of print publication in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
Ali Passian, Ph.D., and his colleagues at ORNL teamed with a research group headed by Vinayak Dravid, Ph.D., at Northwestern to probe the fate of individual nanoparticles inside of cells. Dravid and colleague Gajendra Shekhawat, Ph.D., had earlier developed a modified form of scanning electron microscopy, the Nobel Prize-winning invention, that uses nanoscale cantilevers as ultrasonic probes that can create a holographic image of a rapidly vibrating soft object lying beneath the cantilever as it scans that object. This new form of nanometer-resolution microscopy is known as scanning near-field ultrasonic holography, or SNFUH, and Dravid's research group has used it to generate detailed three-dimensional maps of soft objects.