The nanoparticle-protein corona
It is a (near) universal rule of materials in biology that a material
is always covered by proteins immediately upon contact with a
physiological environment, and we believe that this phenomenon will
also be key to understanding much of the bionanoscience world19.
We have recently argued that the effective unit of interest in the cellnanomaterial
interaction is not the nanoparticle per se, but the particle
and its ‘corona’ of more or less strongly associated proteins from
serum or other body fluids1,2. It is important to understand, though,
that it is not just the composition and organization of this protein
layer, but the exchange times of the proteins on the nanoparticles that
is ‘read’ by living cells.