Magnetic and noble metal nanocomposites for separation and optical detection of biological species.

Nanoalloys and nanocomposites are widely studied classes of nanomaterials within the context of biological systems. They are of immense interest because of the possibility of tuning the optical, magnetic, electronic and chemical properties through particle composition and internal architecture. In principle these properties can therefore be optimized for application in biological detections such as of DNA sequences, bacteria, viruses, antibodies, antigens, and cancer cells. This article presents an overview of methods currently used for nanoalloy and nanocomposite synthesis and characterisation, focusing on Au-Ag and FexOy@Au structures as primary components in detection platforms for plasmonic and magnetically enabled plasmonic bio-sensing.

Artificial neural networks for classification in metabolomic studies of whole cells using 1H nuclear magnetic resonance.

We report the successful classification, by artificial neural networks (ANNs), of (1)H NMR spectroscopic data recorded on whole-cell culture samples of four different lung carcinoma cell lines, which display different drug resistance patterns. The robustness of the approach was demonstrated by its ability to classify the cell line correctly in 100% of cases, despite the demonstrated presence of operator-induced sources of variation, and irrespective of which spectra are used for training and for validation. The study demonstrates the potential of ANN for lung carcinoma classification in realistic situations.

Metabolomic studies of human lung carcinoma cell lines using in vitro (1)H NMR of whole cells and cellular extracts.

We report principal component analysis (PCA) of (1)H NMR spectra recorded for a group of human lung carcinoma cell lines in culture and (1)H NMR analysis of extracts from the same samples. The samples studied were cells of lung tumour origin with different chemotherapy drug resistance patterns. For whole cells, it was found that the statistically significant causes of spectral variation were an increase in the choline and a decrease in the methylene mobile lipid (1)H resonance intensities, which correlate with our knowledge of the level of resistance displayed by the different cells. Similarly, in the (1)H NMR spectra of the aqueous and lipophilic extracts, significant quantitative differences in the metabolite distributions were apparent, which are consistent with the PCA results.