Scientists at Rice University have trapped bismuth in a nanotube cage to tag stem cells for X-ray tracking. Bismuth is probably best known as the active element in a popular stomach-settling elixir and is also used in cosmetics and medical applications. Rice chemist Lon Wilson and his colleagues are inserting bismuth compounds into single-walled carbon nanotubes to make a more effective contrast agent for computed tomography (CT) scanners. Details of the work by Wilson’s Rice team and collaborators at the University of Houston, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital, and the Texas Heart Institute appear in the Journal of Materials Chemistry B. This is not the first time bismuth has been tested for CT scans, and Wilson’s lab has been experimenting for years with nanotube-based contrast agents for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. But this is the first time anyone has combined bismuth with nanotubes to image individual cells, he said. “At some point, we realized no one has ever tracked stem cells, or any other cells that we can find, by CT,” Wilson said. “CT is much faster, cheaper and more convenient, and the instrumentation is much more widespread (than MRI). So we thought if we put bismuth inside the nanotubes and the nanotubes inside stem cells,
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