1. Nanoscale detection of carbon dots-induced changes in actin skeleton of neural cells.
- Author
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Chen L, Yu X, Chen W, Qiu F, Li D, Yang Z, Yang S, Lu S, Wang L, Feng S, Xiu P, Tang M, and Wang H
- Subjects
- Humans, Neurons drug effects, Neurons cytology, Neurons metabolism, Cell Line, Tumor, Particle Size, Surface Properties, Actin Cytoskeleton metabolism, Actin Cytoskeleton drug effects, Actins metabolism, Actins chemistry, Carbon chemistry, Microscopy, Atomic Force, Quantum Dots chemistry, Cell Survival drug effects
- Abstract
Understanding the cytotoxicity of fluorescent carbon dots (CDs) is crucial for their applications, and various biochemical assays have been used to study the effects of CDs on cells. Knowledge on the effects of CDs from a biophysical perspective is integral to the recognition of their cytotoxicity, however the related information is very limited. Here, we report that atomic force microscopy (AFM) can be used as an effective tool for studying the effects of CDs on cells from the biophysical perspective. We achieve this by integrating AFM-based nanomechanics with AFM-based imaging. We demonstrate the performance of this method by measuring the influence of CDs on living human neuroblastoma (SH-SY5Y) cells at the single-cell level. We find that high-dose CDs can mechanically induce elevated normalized hysteresis (energy dissipation during the cell deformation) and structurally impair actin skeleton. The nanomechanical change highly correlates with the alteration of actin filaments, indicating that CDs-induced changes in SH-SY5Y cells are revealed in-depth from the AFM-based biophysical aspect. We validate the reliability of the biophysical observations using conventional biological methods including cell viability test, fluorescent microscopy, and western blot assay. Our work contributes new and significant information on the cytotoxicity of CDs from the biophysical perspective., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)
- Published
- 2024
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