Nano gold simulated autophagy prevents cell death

We showed a kind of rectangular shaped gold-based nanoparticles (gold nanocages, GNC) could enhance the survival of cells from hydroxyurea induced cell apoptosis and significantly reduced the reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels.The nanoparticles could initiate single layer isolation membrane elongation after been phagocytosed, followed by autophagosome and autolysosome formation, then specifically integrated into the autophagosome inner membrane and bind to p62. Through recycling ribosome proteins and activate Nrf2 mediated activation of GATA3 signaling, rescue the cell death and enhanced cell and life survival. Overall design: We used hydroxyurea to induce the cell damage condition and performed cell apoptosis assay and western blot to verify the rescue ability of gold nanoparticles. To gain deeper insights into the molecular functions GNC, we performed RNAseq analysis. RAW 264.7 cells were treated with 0.5mM hydroxyurea (HU, H8627, Sigma Aldrich) and gold nanoparticles at same time. After 12hrs, total RNA of each sample was extracted using RNAiso Plus (TaKaRa Bio Inc., Japan) following the manufacturer's protocol. Total RNA of each sample was quantified and qualified by Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer (Agilent Technologies, Palo Alto, CA, USA), NanoDrop 2000 (Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.). 1 µg total RNA with RIN value above 7 was used for following library preparation. RNA sequencing libraries were prepared using the NEBNext® Ultra™ RNA Library Prep Kit for Illumina® according to manufacturer's protocol (NEB, Ipswich, MA, USA). Sequencing was carried out using a 2x150bp paired-end (PE) configuration; image analysis and base calling were conducted by the HiSeq Control Software (HCS)+OLB+ GAPipeline-1.6 (Illumina) on the HiSeq instrument. GO-TermFinder was used identifying Gene Ontology (GO) terms that annotate a list of enriched genes with a significant p-value less than 0.05. The sequencing reactions were conducted at GENEWIZ, LLC (South Plainfield, NJ, USA).