From September 26th to 28th, the postdoc researcher from the N&N group Dr. Carlos Moya attended the International Conference on Nanomedicine and Nanobiotechnology (ICONAN 2018) in Rome (Italy). He gave a talk about “Human serum Albumin pre-formed on SPIONS”.
Good job Carlos!
Anna and Luo will attend on 9th-10th March the VI Spanish Worm Meeting in Valencia (Spain).
Anna will give the talk on “Evaluation of albumin pre-coated SPIONS in cell culture and C. elegans“ on Friday, 10th March, at 9 am.
Luo will present the poster on “Evaluation of the nano-bio interactions between Au-NPs and Caenorhabditis elegans“ (Laura González-Moragas, Zhongrui Luo, Anna Roig, Anna Laromaine).
The Spanish Worm Meeting (SWM) is a biennial gathering of the scientific communitiy working with C. elegans. It covers a wide range of topics, including development, neurobiology, aging and disease, metabolism and new technologies applied to C. elegans.
In the website www.gusano.info you can find information about previous Spanish Worm Meetings and resources related to C. elegans (research groups, wormbase, wormbook, etc.).
We hope they enjoy the meeting!
This Friday 16th of December Laura González is going to defend her Doctoral Thesis entitled “Evaluating inorganic nanoparticles in the living organism Caenorhabditis elegans”, supervised by Dr. Anna Laromaine and Dr. Anna Roig.
Abstract:
In this thesis, we have used the simple model organism Caenorhabditis elegans as an in vivo biological system to screen inorganic nanoparticles (NPs) with biomedical uses. In particular, we have assessed the behaviour of two types of particles with different composition, size and surface properties: iron oxide NPs coated with citrate and bovine serum albumin, and gold nanoparticles of two different sizes. We have studied their interactions with C. elegans including their uptake, fate, biological effects and NP-responsive molecular mechanisms, and compared our results with previous studies. To this end, we have combined toxicity tests, materials science and imaging techniques and gene expression analysis. We have been able to perform this biological evaluation in the synthetic laboratory where the particles were synthesized and characterised due to the advantageous experiments features of C. elegans.
In summary, this thesis exploits the potential of C. elegans as a simple animal model to evaluate NPs in the initial stages of development and contributes to: (i) a systematic and comprehensive evaluation of NPs in C. elegans, in particular studying the influence of NP properties (size, surface coating and core composition) on their in vivo effects, (ii) extend the toolkit of techniques available to characterise nano-bio interactions in small organisms.
The Jury Members will be:
Everyone is invited to join the presentation, that will be held at 12 pm at ICMAB Conference Room Carles Miravitlles. After the defense, there will be a “pica-pica” for everyone in the dining room.
Miquel Torras, Master Student, coursing “MSc. Applied Materials Chemistry” at Universitat de Barcelona, has secured one of the competitive Severo Ochoa Grants to conduct his research at the ICMAB-CSIC, within the N&N Group!
Miquel will work on magneto-plasmonic nanostructures, following the work of his Bachelor’s degree, under the supervision of Anna Roig.
We are very happy for him! Congratulations Miquel!
More info about the Severo Ochoa Grant call and resolution: https://sede.csic.gob.es/becas-severo-ochoa-icmab
We congratulate Elisa Carenza, who has been awarded with the Extraordinary PhD Award (Premi Extraordinari de Doctorat) for her thesis entitled “Engineering iron oxide nanoparticles for angiogenic therapies“.
Elisa carried out her PhD here at ICMAB, within the N&N Group, and in collaboration with Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR), under the supervision of Anna Roig (ICMAB) and Anna Rosell (VHIR), in the framework of the UAB PhD program.
The awards ceremony will take place on November 18, 2016, at 6.30 pm, at Hotel Campus (Edifici Blanc).
Elisa is now working in a startup biopharmaceutical company (Addex Therapeutics) in Geneva (Switzerland), which develops new molecules for the treatment of neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s and epilepsy. Elisa is investigating the effects of these molecules in humans, in different Clinical Research studies.
Congratulations Elisa!
More information about the Extraordinary PhD award resolution here.
The thesis can be found in the UAB Digital Document Repository : http://ddd.uab.cat/record/128025
The Final Meeting of the COST Action on Hybrid Interfaces (HINT) will take place on October 10-12, 2016, at the Reitoria building of the University of Aveiro, Portugal. The meeting aims at sharing the learned lessons on design, control, and dynamics of interfaces in hybrid organic-inorganic materials over the last four years in which the different partners have worked on this topics.
Anna Roig will participate in the meeting and will give a talk on “Bio-screening of protein coated SPIONs: in vitro and in vivo by the C. elegans model” (Monday, October 10, 5.40 pm).
For more information on the agenda, please visit the conference webiste: http://costhint.web.ua.pt/
Good news! One of our last published articles in Nanoscale was the main star of the inside cover of the journal (Issue 30, Volume 8, 2016).
The article “Bio-identity and fate of albumin-coated SPIONs evaluated in cells and by the C. elegans model” (Si-Ming Yu, Laura González-Moragas, Maria Milla, Androniki Kolovou, Rachel Santarella-Mellwig, Yannick Schwab, Anna Laromaine, Anna Roig) is now published online in Acta Biomaterialia at:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S174270611630349X.
doi:10.1016/j.actbio.2016.07.024.
Abstract: Nanoparticles, whose surface adsorbs proteins in an uncontrolled and non-reproducible manner will have limited uses as nanomedicinal products. A promising approach to avoid nanoparticle non-specific interactions with proteins is to design bio-hybrids by purposely pre-forming a protein corona around the inorganic cores. Here, we investigate, in vitro and in vivo, the newly acquired bio-identity of superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) upon their functionalization with a pre-formed and well-defined bovine serum albumin (BSA) corona. Cellular uptake, intracellular particle distribution and cytotoxicity were studied in two cell lines: adherent and non-adherent cells. BSA decreases nanoparticle internalization in both cell lines and protects the iron core once they have been internalized. The physiological response to the nanoparticles is then in vivo evaluated by oral administration to Caenorhabditis elegans, which was selected as a model of a functional intestinal barrier. Nanoparticle biodistribution, at single particle resolution, is studied by transmission electron microscopy. The analysis reveals that the acidic intestinal environment partially digests uncoated SPIONs but does not affect BSA-coated ones. It also discloses that some particles could enter the nematode’s enterocytes, likely by endocytosis which is a different pathway than the one described for the worm nutrients.
Keywords: Iron oxide nanoparticles; Protein corona; Cytotoxicity; C. elegans; Biodistribution.
Congratulations to all the authors!
Anna Roig will present the work “Gold nanotriangles decorated with superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles: a compositional and microstructural study” (Jordan A. Hachtel, Siming Yu, Andrew R. Lupini, Sokrates T. Pantelides, Marti Gich, Anna Laromaine and Anna Roig) at the Faraday Discussions Conference: Nanoparticles with Morphological and Functional Anisotropy.
The Faraday Discussions Conference will take place in Glasgow, from July 4th-6th. The program of the event is found here. Speakers at the conference include:
It is a great opportunity to discuss this work and other related topics with some of the top scientists on this field! We hope Anna brings back some new ideas to the N&N Group!
