This Week's Sci-light

I must confess, this week's Sci-light made me do a double take.  Gold as a delivery mechanism for medicine or as the article put it 'drug-delivery vehicle?'  I'm curious.

First, look at this picture.  These are gold nanoparticles.  To refresh, nanoparticles are 10^-9 in size.  Another way of saying it--there are 1,000,000 nanometers in 1 millimeter.  What's this size in the natural world?  The width of a strand of DNA is 2.5 nanometers according to The International Society for Optical Engineering. (link downloads a poster) 

http://inhabitat.com/researchers-shine-light-on-gold-nanoparticles-to-produce-electricity/

But let's get back to the concept of 'drug-delivery vehicles.'  A team of scientists from the Institut Laue-Langevin in France, the University of Chicago in the US and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization have been working on how gold nanoparticles affect the cell membrane and possible biomedical applications. 

What have they discovered?  Author Belle Dume tells us in her article, "Positive or negative?  Nanoparticle surface charge affects cell membrane interactions" that "positively charged particles can penetrate deep into cell membranes while negatively charged particles do not enter the cell wall at all, but instead prevent it breaking down under certain conditions."  That means that positively charged gold nanoparticles can get inside the cell membrane--the cell's powerful line of defense. -->

Curious?  Good!  That's what this blog is suppose to encourage.  Click the link and learn more. 

Just a closing thought.  What we understand about our world takes us both to macro level and the micro level of discovery.  Where do you want to discover!?!