Last week, our group members Luo Zhongrui, Genís Rabost and Anna Laromaine worked on the beam line MIRAS at the synchrothron ALBA in collaboration with Núria Benseny. We visualized C. elegans by FTIR and analyzed their tissues. They also had the visit of a former group member Laura Gonzalez-Moragas, who started this research line.
Here you can read the abstract of the paper:
We present a mechanistic study of the effect of iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) in C. elegans combining a genome-wide analysis with the investigation of specific molecular markers frequently linked to nanotoxicity. The effects of two different coatings were explored: citrate, an anionic stabilizer, and bovine serum albumin, as a pre-formed protein corona. The transcriptomic study identified differentially expressed genes following an exposure to SPIONs. The expression of genes involved in oxidative stress, metal detoxification response, endocytosis, intestinal integrity and iron homeostasis was quantitatively evaluated. The role of oxidative stress was confirmed by gene expression analysis and by synchrotron Fourier Transform infrared microscopy based on the higher tissue oxidation of NP-treated animals. The observed transcriptional modulation of key signaling pathways such as MAPK and Wnt suggests that SPIONs might be endocytosed by clathrin-mediated processes, a putative mechanism of nanotoxicity which deserves further mechanistic investigations.
Citation: Toxicogenomics of iron oxide nanoparticles in the nematode C. elegans Laura Gonzalez-Moragas, Si-Ming Yu, Núria Benseny-Cases, Stephen Stürzenbaum, Anna Roig and Anna Laromaine Nanotoxicology, Accepted manuscript online: 15 Jun 2017. DOI: 10.1080/17435390.2017.1342011
Researchers from the VHIR and our group obtained first images of human endothelial progenitor cells by Transmission Soft X-ray Microscopy at ALBA Synchrotron.
The experiment, performed at the MISTRAL beamline leaded by Dr. Eva Pereiro, allowed us to image whole Endothelial Progenitor Cells (EPC) containing iron oxide nanoparticles by perfoming X-ray cryo-tomography.
The experiment was undertaken by Estela Serra, Anna Laromaine and Anna Roig from our group and Anna Rosell from the Neurovascular Research Laboratory, Institut de Recerca Hospital Vall d’Hebron (VHIR).