Preparation, Characterization And Cell Biological Properties Of Selenium/Sulphur Nanoparticles

There was an increasing interest in nanomaterials, because of their wide application prospect in fields of photocatalysis, electrochemistry, biomedicine and so on. Nowadays, nano-selenium with higher bioactivity, oxidation resistance and hypotoxicity has been used in fields of the body’s metabolism and biomedicine, which had achieved good results.Sulfur has great advantage in the field of photocatalysis. Sulfur and selenium belong to the same group, so sulfur might have good bioactivity.In this paper, hydrothermal process and ion exchange method have been used to synthesize nano-selenium and nano-sulfur, respectively. The composition and morphology of the samples have been characterized by XRD, EDS, SEM and TEM. The stability of the samples has been characterized by TG-DTA and FT-IR. We have speculated the possible mechanism through the study of the effect of the nano-selenium and nano-sulfur on the bioactivity of the cancer cells in vitro.Hydrothermal process was applied to synthesize nano-selenium, with bovine serum albumin as the surfactant. The particle size of nano-selenium changed over the time. The results in vitro showed that the dose-dependent and time-dependent inhibiting effect of nano-selenium on hepatoma carcinoma cell. However, there is little effect on the breast cancer cell.Under the acidic condition, we used sodium thiosulfate as the sulfur source to prepare elemental sulfur. The difference was whether surfactant was added or not. By XRD analysis, we achieved crystalline samples and amorphous samples. The results in vitro showed that the dose-dependent and time-dependent inhibiting effect of nano-sulphur onhepatoma carcinoma cell However, there is little effect on normal cell.