Transient extracellular application of gold nanostars increases hippocampal neuronal activity

Journal of Nanobiotechnology

Research

Zurab Kereselidze¹  Xomalin G Peralta¹  Fidel Santamaria²  Frank DeLuna²  Kirstie Salinas² 

[1] Department of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Texas, 78249, San Antonio, Texas, USA;UTSA Neurosciences Institute, The University of Texas at San Antonio, 78249, San Antonio, Texas, USA;

关键词: Nanoparticle;    Uptake;    Nanotoxicity;    Neurons;    Potassium channels;    Firing rate;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12951-014-0031-y

 received in 2014-05-09, accepted in 2014-08-08,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundWith the increased use of nanoparticles in biomedical applications there is a growing need to understand the effects that nanoparticles may have on cell function. Identifying these effects and understanding the mechanism through which nanoparticles interfere with the normal functioning of a cell is necessary for any therapeutic or diagnostic application. The aim of this study is to evaluate if gold nanoparticles can affect the normal function of neurons, namely their activity and coding properties.ResultsWe synthesized star shaped gold nanoparticles of 180 nm average size. We applied the nanoparticles to acute mouse hippocampal slices while recording the action potentials from single neurons in the CA3 region. Our results show that CA3 hippocampal neurons increase their firing rate by 17% after the application of gold nanostars. The increase in excitability lasted for as much as 50 minutes after a transient 5 min application of the nanoparticles. Further analyses of the action potential shape and computational modeling suggest that nanoparticles block potassium channels responsible for the repolarization of the action potentials, thus allowing the cell to increase its firing rate.ConclusionsOur results show that gold nanoparticles can affect the coding properties of neurons by modifying their excitability.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Salinas et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.