qNano: High-Resolution Nanoparticle Size and Charge Characterization

纳米技术带来了重大的科学和技术进步，这一切都是由材料的独特性质推动的，因为它们的尺寸被缩小到纳米级，其表面在材料总质量中所占的比例要高得多。在这种情况下，能够获得在评估纳米颗粒的尺寸和表面化学(特别是表面电荷)方面提供最先进准确性的方法，对于将纳米材料的性能与其特性相关联，从而促进纳米级技术的合理和加速设计至关重要。这类测量的传统技术存在固有的局限性，因为它们基于大颗粒群体的光散射，给出的结果高度平均，往往过于强调大颗粒，错过了区分多个群体的能力。最近，单纳米颗粒跟踪技术已经克服了总体平均化问题，但仍然依赖于光衍射和对3D体积内多种尺寸颗粒的有效光学聚焦，要做到无偏移具有极大的挑战性。为了应对这一挑战，Izon Sciences开发了qNano，这是一种市场上独一无二的仪器，它通过应用孔内电阻的变化(库尔特原理)，通过一次测量来测量高分辨率、基于数字的尺寸和电荷分布以及纳米颗粒浓度。不同人群之间提供的更高分辨率将允许对纳米颗粒聚集进行更详细的分析，这是从癌症肿瘤靶向到矿物浮选等领域共同申请者正在进行的项目的关键组成部分。此外，通过改变气孔大小和/或驱动颗粒通过仪器流动的压力，可以获得关于软纳米颗粒的弹性和悬浮液中不对称纳米颗粒(如碳纳米管和纤维素纳米晶)的尺寸的独特见解，这是任何其他可用的仪器都无法获得的。最终，共同申请者将把从qNano获得的独特见解应用于合理开发治疗癌症以及眼科和神经疾病的药物输送工具，即可控制的自组装功能生物医学设备。

Nanotechnology has led to significant scientific and technological advancements, all driven by the unique properties of materials as their size is reduced to the nanoscale and their surface comprises a significantly higher fraction of the total mass of the material. In this context, having access to methods that provide state-of-the-art accuracy in assessing both the size and surface chemistry (in particular, surface charge) of nanoparticles is essential to correlate the performance of nanomaterials with their properties and thus facilitate the rational and accelerated design of nanoscale technologies. Traditional techniques for such measurements are inherently limited in that they are based on light scattering from large particle populations, giving highly averaged results that tend to over-emphasize larger particles and miss differentiating multiple populations. More recently, single nanoparticle tracking techniques have overcome the population averaging issues but remain dependent on light diffraction and effective optical focusing on particles with multiple sizes within a 3D volume, highly challenging to do without bias. To address this challenge, Izon Sciences has developed the qNano, a unique-to-the-market instrument that instead applies changes in electrical resistance across a pore (the Coulter principle) to measure high-resolution, number-based size and charge distributions as well as nanoparticle concentrations via a single measurement. The higher resolution provided between different populations will allow for significantly more detailed analysis of nanoparticle aggregation, a critical component of ongoing projects among the co-applicants in fields ranging from cancer tumour targeting to mineral flotation. Furthermore, by changing the pore size and/or the pressure driving flow of the particles through the instrument, unique insight can be acquired regarding the elasticity of soft nanoparticles and the dimensions of asymmetric nanoparticles (such as carbon nanotubes and cellulose nanocrystals) in suspension that is inaccessible using any other available instrument. Ultimately, the co-applicants will apply the unique insight to be gained from the qNano to the rational development of drug delivery vehicles for treating cancer as well as ophthalmic and neurological disorders, self-assembled functional biomedical devices that are controllable