The present work introduces an impact of polyelectrolyte-based hydrophilic shell on magnetic relaxivity and luminescence of hard cores built from isostructural complexes of Tb(III) and Gd(III) in the core-shell aqueous colloids. Microscopic and scattering techniques reveal "plum pudding" morphology of the colloids, where polyelectrolyte-coated ultrasmall (<5nm) hard cores form aggregates in aqueous solutions. Interaction of bovine serum albumin (BSA) with the colloids provides a tool to modify the polyelectrolyte-based shell, which is the reason for the improvement in both aggregation behavior of the colloids and their relaxivity. The modification of the hydrophilic polyelectrolyte-based shell enables to tune the longitudinal relaxivity from 5.9 to 23.3mM-1s-1 at 0.47T. This tendency is the reason for significant improvement of contrasting effect of the colloids in T1- and T2-weighted images obtained by whole body scanner at 1.5T. High contrasting effect of the colloids, together with low cytotoxicity towards Wi-38 diploid human cells makes them promising MRI contrast agents.
Keywords: Aggregation behavior; BSA interaction; Cell viability; Cytotoxicity; Gadolinium-based colloids; Nuclear magnetic relaxation; Tuning of relaxivity.
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