Vesicles tethered to microbubbles by hybridized DNA oligonucleotides: flow cytometry analysis of this new drug delivery vehicle design.

Hybridization of complementary lipid-linked DNA oligonucleotides was used to tether small unilamellar vesicles (SUVs) to the lipid monolayer shells of air-microbubbles, a new attachment design for a drug delivery vehicle to be used in tandem with ultrasound imaging. Flow cytometry was used, and a novel analysis was developed, based upon light scattering and fluorescence intensity, to quantify the fraction of microbubbles of chosen size-ranges with oligonucleotide-tethered fluorescently labeled SUVs. Fluorescence microscopy was used to verify that our methodology results in successful high-density SUV tethering to a similar fraction of the microbubbles when compared to the flow cytometry statistics. The fraction of successful tetherings increased with the concentration of the complementary lipid-linked oligonucleotide as expected and decreased with the time that microbubbles were incubated with SUVs, which was not expected. Also unexpected, a large fraction of microbubbles had only background fluorescence levels while a much smaller fraction (at most one-eighth, for the shortest incubation and highest concentration of lipid-linked oligonucleotide) had oligonucleotide-tethered fluorescently labeled SUVs and, according to our fluorescence microscopy, that small fraction was densely covered with SUVs. Ejection of the lipid-linked oligonucleotide during high surface pressure compression of the monolayer shells of actively shrinking microbubbles subjected to the Laplace overpressure is speculated as a qualitative explanation for the statistics.