Low uptake of silica nanoparticles in Caco-2 intestinal epithelial barriers Ye, Dong Bramini, Mattia Hristov, Delyan R Wan, Sha Salvati, Anna Åberg, Christoffer Dawson, Kenneth A Cellular barriers, such as the skin, the lung epithelium or the intestinal epithelium, constitute one of the first obstacles facing nanomedicines or other nanoparticles entering organisms. It is thus important to assess the capacity of nanoparticles to enter and transport across such barriers. In this work, Caco-2 intestinal epithelial cells were used as a well-established model for the intestinal barrier, and the uptake, trafficking and translocation of model silica nanoparticles of different sizes were investigated using a combination of imaging, flow cytometry and transport studies. Compared to typical observations in standard cell lines commonly used for in vitro studies, silica nanoparticle uptake into well-developed Caco-2 cellular barriers was found to be very low. Instead, nanoparticle association to the apical outer membrane was substantial and these particles could easily be misinterpreted as internalised in the absence of imaging. Passage of nanoparticles through the barrier was very limited, suggesting that the low amount of internalised nanoparticles was due to reduced uptake into cells, rather than a considerable transport through them. 2026-02-17T10:41:24Z 2026-02-17T10:41:24Z 2017-07-07 journal article Low uptake of silica nanoparticles in Caco-2 intestinal epithelial barriers. 2017, D Ye, M Bramini, DR Hristov, S Wan, A Salvati, C Åberg, KA Dawson Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology 8 (1), 1396-1406 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/111084 10.3762/bjnano.8.141 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Belstein