Figure 9. . Nonclassical monocytes have a higher uptake of poly(acrylic acid)-coated iron oxide nanoparticles.

Whole-blood samples were treated with PAC-IONs for 1.5 h and stained with anti-CD45-PE-Cy7, anti-CD14-PE, anti-CD16 V450 and anti-HLA-DR-FITC. Flow cytometer dot plots show the distribution of classical, nonclassical and intermediate monocytes, then overlaid histograms through the K–S Goodness-of-Fit test compared the granularity in the absence (left) or in the presence of PAC-IONs (right). The changes in the granularity for classical and nonclassical monocytes were compared by test in the FlowJo program version 7.6.2. The consolidated information of five independent experiments is shown in (B). MDMs were differentiated from CD14⁺CD16^- (CD14⁺) or CD14⁺CD16⁺ (CD16⁺) monocytes in the absence or presence of PAC-IONs for 5 days (C); then, MDMs were lysed and acid-digested for quantifying the intracellular iron content by AAS. The comparison was made with the Wilcoxon test, n = 4, independent experiments.

AAS: Atomic absorption spectrometry; KS: Kolmogorov–Smirnov; MDM: Differentiation into mature macrophage; PAC-ION: Poly(acrylic acid)-coated iron oxide nanoparticle; SSC: Side scatter.