Last week, Ratna Tantra of the National Physical Laboratories (NPL) payed a visit to IOM and the SAFENANO team. During this time, she provided us with this blog, which collates her thoughts on nanoparticle characterisation and the needs of end users:
Last October, I was fortunate enough to attend a two-day workshop on 'Enabling Standards for Nanomaterial Characterization' in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The workshop featured a series of presentations by scientists of various disciplines, concerned in developing standards and standardised methods for nanoparticle characterisation. On the second day, we broke into smaller groups and as part of a 'consensus exercise' the various groups were required to identify and prioritise research needs. As I’m currently involved in research projects concerning the characterisation of nanoparticles at National Physical Laboratory, I ended up being placed in Group 2, "Protocol Development: Physical Property Characterisation". As expected, people from mathematics, physics or chemistry background mainly filled Group 2, apart from one biologist. Lurking in our midst, she assured us that she was there for a reason. She wanted the "nanoparticle characterisation experts" to give her guidance and her question was: "What tools would I need to characterise my nanoparticles in a cell culture medium?"
I guess this question made me think about the current techniques on offer to the end users. We certainly have tools that would allow us to probe aspects of the nanoparticle parameters, under certain defined sampling and experimental conditions. This may be sufficient to meet the needs of the nanoparticle manufacturers but what about other end users, with their different/specific applications? For example, the toxicologists and environmentalists, who would need to characterise the fate and behaviour of nanoparticles in situ, or generally in complex media. In order to approach the problem in a logical manner, end users would need to state guidelines for their particular measurement requirements, enough so that confidence in the data is at an acceptable level. In this sense, end users would need to provide:
a) an estimate on the required degree of : accuracy and reproducibility
b) better understanding on the nature of the selectivity requirements
A start in the right direction would be to identify key organisations and subsequently conduct an extensive survey, so as to have some kind of benchmark on the measurement needs for the end users in the nano-community. Nonetheless, I have a feeling that the outcome would eventually point us to the direction of investing efforts to:
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improve the selectivity and specificity of current methods (most likely to involve the development of new technologies)
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increase portability of test equipment
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improve throughput
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engage in applied research and the development of specific applications
Are all of these endpoints achievable? The nature of the problem is not trivial; someone once told me that “to characterise a nanoparticle in a complex media is like trying to find a needle in a pile of other needles!” In addition, the development of new technologies is expensive. It is obvious that success will be governed by striking the right balance between: finance needed to support this kind of research and the ability for people to work together across disciplines to address this issue.
Postscript:
There are several nanoparticle characterisation projects running across NPL, both government and industry sponsored projects. To some extent, my views concerning the need to find new platforms to characterise/detect nanoparticles have previously echoed in: