The team tested the nanoparticles on human immune cells cultured in vitro. It turned out that they
An international team of scientists has said that the effectiveness of vaccines can be increased by 25% if left-handed chiral gold nanoparticles are added as adjuvants.
The researchers used vaccines developedto fight a specific strain of the influenza virus. According to them, the results of the work can be extrapolated to any type of vaccine. However, more research is needed in each case. The reason is that left-handed chiral gold nanoparticles are not an active ingredient, but an adjuvant that enhances the immune response of the recipient.
Chirality is the lack of symmetryregarding the right and left sides. For example, if the reflection of an object in an ideal flat mirror differs from the object itself, then the object is inherently chirality. So the left-handed gold molecules are a mirror image of the right-handed ones and cannot "turn" into each other by a simple rotation around their axis.
The authors used gold nanoparticles,which are symmetrical and lack chirality. The scientists first induced chirality in them by making them interact with the amino acid cysteine, and then enhanced the induced chirality by exposing them to polarized light using the amino acid phenylalanine.
As a result, the authors obtained three nanoparticles: the initial achiral gold, the right-handed enantiomer, and the left-handed enantiomer.
During the experiment, the team found that enantiomers significantly increase the effectiveness of the vaccine. For example, with the left-handed enantiomer, it increased by 25.8%.
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