Genetically-produced and bioinspired magnetic nanoparticles as novel photoacoustic contrast agents (Conference Presentation)

Here, we demonstrated that natural magnetic nanoparticles (nMNP) from magnetotactic bacteria can serve as photoacoustic high-contrast agents for single cell analysis. The main benefits of nMNP include biocompatibility and relatively low laser fluence for photoacoustic detection. These features together with safety of photoacoustics provide potential for clinical translation. Further decoration of nMNP with NIR-absorbing gold nanorods provided hybrid nanoparticles with strong NIR absorption and plasmonic effects for cancer cell theranostics. In studies in vivo, we showed that circulating tumor cells labeled with bioinspired hybrids generated transient ultrasharp photoacoustic resonances as the basis for new super-resolution photoacoustic flow cytometry in vivo.