Date of Award

Summer 8-2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Biomedical Engineering

Abstract

In the past decades, the development of nanotechnology has had tremendous successes in material science. In this technology, the pertinent materials are used at the intermediate scale between individual molecules and their size in the nanometer region(1-100nm) compared to bulk materials. This nanoscale size provides a larger surface area; therefore, nanoparticles would be perfect essential components of nanotechnology. The reduced size of nanoparticles has a larger surface ratio to volume, which can modify their chemical, mechanical, structural, and electrical properties.

In this study, the main goal is to test different metal related nanoparticles, such as CuNPs (Copper nanoparticles), FeNPs (Iron nanoparticles), CuHARS (Copper high-aspect ratio structure) and, Zn (Zinc microparticles) with different biological environments. In specific biological environments, such as sterilized water, deionized water, and various cell culture media, nanoparticles will change their morphology in different degrees; also, in living cells (astrocyte and CRL rat brain glioma cells) environment these nanoparticles either damage the cells or would not harm the cells.

The hypothesis of this project is that CuHARS or CuNPs under biological conditions would degrade. In order to prove this hypothesis as valid, CuHARS with CuNPs were tested in sterilized water and cell culture media at room temperature and body temperature. The result showed that CuHARS and CuNPs will degrade in cell culture media at room temperature and body temperature at different pace. Surprisingly, CuHARS and CuNPs in sterilized water are aggregated in different levels. Charges around the nanoparticles cause them to aggregate or evenly disperse in water, but they do not degrade. After the testing, image analysis methods were used to extrapolate nanoparticles as either aggregating, degrading, or more stable.

After testing FeNPs in astrocyte cells and CRL rat brain glioma cancer cells, the hypothesis was that FeNPs would not affect morphology of the cells. Results showed that astrocyte and CRL rat brain glioma cancer cells were not damaged and were healthy. However, other nanoparticles, such as CuNPs and, CuHARS have toxicity by nature, they harmed the normal astrocyte and CRL rat brain glioma cancer cells.

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