A functionalized gold nanoparticles-assisted universal carrier for
nucleic acid
Min Su Han
Department of Chemistry Chung-Ang University, Seoul 156-756, Korea
E-mail: mshan@cau.ac.kr
Recently, nanomaterials, including carbon nanotubes, iron oxide, silica, and gold nanoparticles,
have been intensively studied as gene delivery systems. Gold nanoparticles in these nanomaterial are
attractive scaffolds for the creation of gene delivery systems because they are bioinert, nontoxic, and easily
synthesized and functionalized. Thus far, several strategies for gene delivery systems have been developed,
including mixed monolayer protected gold nanoparticles, complexes of polymer and gold nanoparticles,
double-stranded DNA functionalized gold nanoparticles, and single stranded DNA functionalized gold
nanoparticles.
Especiallty, single-stranded DNA functionalized gold nanoparticles were proved as a good
gene delivery system and antisense. 1
Moreover, these nanoparticles showed greater knockdown of gene
expression, higher binding affinity for target DNA, higher immunity to nuclease, and lower cell toxicity
than antisense DNA delivered by either Lipofectamine or Cytofectin. However, the system could deliver
only antisense DNA covalently cross-linked to gold nanoprticles, which needed to be individually
synthesized for each gene of interest, procedures that are both time consuming and inconvenient. Thus we
developed a method that can be used for delivery of any antisense DNA oligo without a need for the
synthesis of the gold naoparticles covalently linked to antisense DNA oligo specific to the gene of interest.
Recently, we proved single-stranded DNA functionalized gold nanoparticles not only as a general
platform for loading and delivering antisense DNA specific to any gene of interest (Scheme 1) but as a delevery
system for shRNA, DNAzyme, and peptide nucleotide acids too. The details results will be presented.
Scheme 1. Schematic mechanism of a single-stranded DNA functionalized gold nanoparticle-antisense.
Reference
1.
) N. L. Rosi, D. A. Giljohann, C. S. Thaxton, A. K. R. Lytton-Jean, M. S. Han and C. A. Mirkin,
Science, 2006, 312, 1027.