| Abstract Scope |
Nanoparticles (NP) have extensive applications in nanomedicine and industrial applications. It is important to characterize NP properties due to potential environmental and manufacturing exposures. In a biological environment, NPs are exposed to proteins which can adsorb onto the surface of NPs, forming a protein corona. Hydrophobicity is an important property in characterizing the agglomeration state under biological and environmental conditions. Current methods for determining hydrophobicity are limited and cannot be applied to all NPs due to size, shape, surface roughness, or heterogeneity. In this study, we used hydrophobic Rose bengal dye and hydrophilic Nile blue A dye to measure the hydrophobicity of carboxylate modified polystyrene, amine modified polystyrene, amine modified magnetic, and carboxylate modified magnetic NPs. Hydrophobicity is quantified using the partitioning quotient by varying concentrations of NPs with fixed concentrations of Rose bengal and Nile Blue A. We determined that all nanoparticles tested are hydrophilic. |