A generally adoptable radiotracing method for tracking carbon nanotubes in animals.

Carbon nanotube (CNT) mediated drug delivery systems have currently aroused a great deal of interest. Such delivery systems for drugs, proteins and genes have been preliminarily studied using cellular and animal models. For the further study of the pharmacokinetics and related biological behaviours of CNTs in vivo, a fast and convenient tracing method is particularly demanded. In this paper, we developed a generally adoptable tracing method for the biodistribution study of functionalized CNTs in vivo. Taurine covalently functionalized multi-walled carbon nanotubes (tau-MWNTs) and Tween-80 wrapped MWNTs (Tween-MWNTs) were labelled with (125)I, and then their distribution in mice was determined. It is interesting that Tween-80 can reduce the RES uptake of MWNTs remarkably. The resulting distribution of (125)I-tau-MWNTs was very consistent with that using (14)C-taurine-MWNTs as the CNTs tracer, which means the easy (125)I labelling method is reliable and effective.