3.5 Albumin

Some proteins, particularly human serum albumin (HSA) ⁵⁸ and bovine serum albumin (BSA) ⁵⁹, have been employed in the encapsulation of GNRs. HSA and BSA have been used extensively to coat a variety of nanomaterials due to their biocompatibility, water compatibility and degradability. However, albumin is vulnerable to temperature rises, which can induce changes in the conformation of the protein, resulting in the exposure of CTAB, leading to associated toxicity issues. Thermal aggregation of BSA has been studied and it was revealed that this conformational change occurs at around 60 °C ^60-62. Given that PTT can cause the generation of localised temperatures well above this value, albumin may not be the most suitable coating for GNR designs for use in PTT. However, BSA and HSA could still serve a useful role in nanomaterials where no heating effect is anticipated.