Intracellular performance of tailored nanoparticle tracers in magnetic particle imaging

Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) is a quantitative mass-sensitive, tracer-based imaging technique, with potential applications in various cellular imaging applications. The spatial resolution of MPI, in the first approximation, improves by decreasing the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the field-derivative of the magnetization, dm/dH of the nanoparticle (NP) tracers. The FWHM of dm/dH depends critically on NPs’ size, size distribution, and their environment. However, there is limited information on the MPI performance of the NPs after their internalization into cells. In this work, 30 to 150 μg of the iron oxide NPs were incubated in a lysosome-like acidic buffer (0.2 ml, 20 mM citric acid, pH 4.7) and investigated by vibrating sample magnetometry, magnetic particle spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and dynamic light scattering (DLS). The FWHM of the dm/dH curves of the NPs increased with incubation time and buffer to NPs ratio, consistent with a decrease in the median core size of the NPs from ∼20.1 ± 0.98 to ∼18.5 ± 3.15 nm. Further, these smaller degraded NPs formed aggregates that responded to the applied field by hysteretic reversal at higher field values and increased the FWHM. The rate of core size decrease and aggregation were inversely proportional to the concentration of the incubated NPs, due to their slower biodegradation kinetics. The results of this model experiment show that the MPI performance of the NPs in the acidic environments of the intracellular organelles (i.e., lysosomes and endosomes) can be highly dependent on their rate of internalization, residence time, and degradation.