pH Sensitive Dextran Coated Fluorescent Nanodiamonds as a Biomarker for HeLa Cells Endocytic Pathway and Increased Cellular Uptake
Linyan Nie,
Yue Zhang,
Lei Li,
Patrick van Rijn,
Romana Schirhagl
Affiliations
Linyan Nie
Department of Biomedical Engineering, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, A. Deusinglaan 1, 9713 AV Groningen, The Netherlands
Yue Zhang
Department of Biomedical Engineering, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, A. Deusinglaan 1, 9713 AV Groningen, The Netherlands
Lei Li
Department of Biomedical Engineering, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, A. Deusinglaan 1, 9713 AV Groningen, The Netherlands
Patrick van Rijn
Department of Biomedical Engineering, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, A. Deusinglaan 1, 9713 AV Groningen, The Netherlands
Romana Schirhagl
Department of Biomedical Engineering, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, A. Deusinglaan 1, 9713 AV Groningen, The Netherlands
Fluorescent nanodiamonds are a useful for biosensing of intracellular signaling networks or environmental changes (such as temperature, pH or free radical generation). HeLa cells are interesting to study with these nanodiamonds since they are a model cell system that is widely used to study cancer-related diseases. However, they only internalize low numbers of nanodiamond particles very slowly via the endocytosis pathway. In this work, we show that pH-sensitive, dextran-coated fluorescent nanodiamonds can be used to visualise this pathway. Additionally, this coating improved diamond uptake in HeLa cells by 5.3 times (*** p < 0.0001) and decreased the required time for uptake to only 30 min. We demonstrated further that nanodiamonds enter HeLa cells via endolysosomes and are eventually expelled by cells.
