NanoSight, the nanoparticle characterisation company, has recently received its 100th purchase order for the unique nanoparticle tracking analysis system that counts individual particles in liquid.
Professor Steffen Petersen of the University of Aalborg in Denmark has selected the NanoSight LM10 to study the build-up of multi-layered, targeted nanoparticle drug delivery systems. His particular attraction to the LM10 is its ability not just to size particles but to investigate the potential to provide information about an individual particle's refractive index.
Among the goals of the Petersen group is the construction of drug delivery vehicles around an iron oxide core that will enable the group to study how effective different targeting molecules are using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques.
The NanoSight systems use an optical microscope combined with a digital camera to record 30 frames per second of individual nanoparticles moving under Brownian motion in liquid as they pass through a laser beam. Each particle will scatter light and it is this light path that is followed. Advanced software enables the path of each particle to be "tracked" to give a very accurate size dispersion calculation, which is invaluable when studying systems with different size ranges.
For more information about the principles of nanoparticle tracking analysis and how this is applied to many applications in both the biological and materials sciences, please visit www.nanosight.co.uk.
