UC San Diego

Nanomedicine is one of the most promising areas of nanotechnology, aspiring to use nanoparticles and structures to diagnose, analyze, and treat medical conditions. Current research in nanomedicine relies on larger scale measurement and there has not been a study that shows how the individual cells react to the presence of nanoparticles. It is our belief that understanding how a cell reacts and interacts with semi-conducting or metal nanostructures, specifically nanowires (NW) is important for designing future nanodevices, particularly Neuroprosthetics. Adult rat hippocampal progenitor cells from female Fischer 344 rats were cultured to be kept in its undifferentiated state and were allowed to settle by gravity on top of three types of NW chips - ones with horizontal, vertical, and random growth of silicon nanowires to answer the following questions : 1. Are cells viable with nanowire structures? 2. How does the cell interact with nanowires by observing changes in cellular component, specifically cytoskeletal movement (contents or arrangements) when in contact with the NWs. Results showed that there were significantly less viable cells found on horizontal NWs than vertical ones, although mechanical difficulty with imaging vertical NW may have contributed to death or loss of cell interaction with NW on imaging. There was evidence of cells actively and preferentially interacting with NWs with horizontal NW chips. Future direction of the study would be to use NWs to stimulate and detect electrical activities within the cell and study how the ion gradients are affected in/around the cell