BATON ROUGE Ram Devireddy, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at LSU, recently co-authored an article with Todd Monroe, assistant professor of biological and agricultural engineering, investigating the complex effects of nanoparticles on cell freezing. The report was published in the prestigious journal Nanotechnology.
The results of their study while not what they expected could end up impacting cancer treatment. Devireddy and Monroe initiated a study to investigate the effects of gold-based nanoparticles, or microscopic particles equal to one-thousandth the thickness of a single strand of human hair, on cell transport and the response of those cells after being frozen. Their hypothesis: nanoparticles would alleviate the damaging effects generally caused by the freezing process.
Most cells are like bags of water, Devireddy said. Ice crystals have sharp edges that tend to poke the cells and break them up, causing damage. That is why, for example, frozen food, when thawed and cooked, tends to be mushier that fresh produce.
The researchers, along with graduate students Sreedhar Thirumala and Julianne Audiffred, used the nanoparticles to replace dimethylsulfoxide, a commonly used cryoprotective agent.
Cryoprotective agents, or CPAs, have long been used to alleviate freezing injury and to enhance the number of cells that survive the freezing process, said Thirumala. The drawback is that CPAs can also cause cell death when used in high concentrations and need to be removed from cells immediately after freezing.
Devireddy and Monroe believed that nanoparticles might act as a benign replacement for CPAs. To test this, they added commercially available gold nanoparticles to cells suspended in a culture medium.
However, contrary to their initial hypothesis, Devireddy and Monroe found that the nanoparticles did not significantly change the freezing response of either HeLa cells, which are derived from a specific cerv
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Contact: Ram Devireddy
devireddy@me.lsu.edu
225-578-5891
Louisiana State University
14-Jun-2007