Effects of Macromolecular Crowding on Nanoparticle Diffusion: New Insights from Mössbauer Spectroscopy.

In this work, we used Mössbauer spectroscopy as a new approach for experimental quantification of the self-diffusion coefficient () and hydrodynamic (HD) size of iron-containing nanoparticles (NPs) in complex crowded solutions, mimicking cell cytoplasm. As a probe, we used 9 nm cobalt ferrite NPs (CFNs) dispersed in solutions of bovine serum albumin (BSA) with a volume fraction (φ) of 0-0.2.