“Ultramixing”: A Simple and Effective Method To Obtain Controlled and Stable Dispersions of Graphene Oxide in Cell Culture Media

The last decade has seen an increase in the application of graphene oxide (GO) in the biomedical field. GO has been successfully exploited for its ability to deliver many kinds of drugs into target cells. However, GO toxicity assessment is still controversial. Several studies demonstrated that GO protein coating is crucial to alleviate the material’s toxicity. Besides, coronation leads to the formation of big agglomerates, reducing the cellular uptake of the material and thus its therapeutic efficiency. In this work, we propose a simple and efficient method based on rapid (Ultra-Turrax, UT) mixing to control protein corona formation. Using UT protocol, we were able to reduce GO agglomeration in the presence of proteins and to obtain stable GO dispersions in cell culture media. By labelling GO with luminescent nanoparticles (QDs), we studied the GO internalization kinetic and efficiency. Comparing the “classic” and the UT protocols, we found that the latter allows a faster and more efficient internalizatio...