OPTIMISATION AND PERFORMANCE QUANTIFICATION ACOUSTIC TRAPPING USING SYNTHETIC NANOPARTICLES

Acoustic trapping is becoming increasingly popular as a tool to isolate and enrich biological nanoparticles [1] (particularly extracellular vesicles [2]), yet an inherent problem with acoustic trapping of nanoparticles is calibration of the trapping efficiency. This abstract presents in-house synthesized nanoparticles with different sound scattering properties, either rigid high density gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) as model system for inorganic nanoparticles (NPs) or synthetic lipid bilayer nano vesicles to mimic the acoustic properties of biological vesicles. The rapid NP synthesis facilitates characterisation of the trapping performance of a single node acoustic trapping system, e.g. by designing application specific NPs size ladders. This is shown by the trapping of AuNPs of two different sizes and synthetic lipid bilayer vesicles and demonstrating a 6-11% NP recovery. The work demonstrates the potential of freshly synthesized nanoparticles as a tool for optimisation of acoustic trapping protocols as well as a fast and simple NP trapping performance verification by visual inspection.