Nanoparticles (NPs) offer the possibility to chemically and structurally tune their properties impacting on how they interact with biological materials. Hundreds of NPs have been proposed as drug carriers and therapies, however the lack of a time- and batch-efficient method to evaluate NPs and processes prevents establishing general fundamental principles and impedes the progress of these future drugs and therapies unless high throughput methods advance. Our lab has a lot of experience in synthesizing metallic nanoparticles such as gold NP and Iron oxide NP  for biomedical applications.

The combination of anatomical, biochemical and genetic tools with materials science characterization techniques in the tiny C. elegans in vivo and at multiple biological levels (whole organism, organs, tissues, cells and pathways) will breakthrough in the engineering of NPs for oral delivery decreasing time and cost effort.

We assess the  biocompatibility of our nanoparticles in C. elegans, evaluating how the chemical composition, structure, shape, size… among other parameters could affect the biocompatibility properties. We use tests for viability of C. elegans, such movement, live/dead, ROS, lenght and we complement them with chemical and physical techniques to measure how the NP changed after the interaction with C. elegans,  such electron microscopy, Dinamyc light scattering, uv-vis,Infrared spectroscopy, optical microscopy and magnetometry among others.