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Nano-Probes Stay Inside a Cell's Nucleus for Days
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) have developed fluorescent and stable nano-probes which can stay inside a cell's nucleus for hours or even days. According to this LBL news release, this will help biologists to better understand nuclear processes that evolve slowly, such as DNA replication, genomic alterations, and cell cycle control. This research was partially based on previous investigations about quantum dots. Now, the researchers want to tailor their quantum dots, which emit different colors depending on their sizes, to check specific chemical reactions inside nuclei, such as how proteins help repair DNA after irradiation. Read more for other details and references and to see how a nano-sized probe is entering a cell's nucleus."
It's been a long time since my biology classes, but I can't think of any reaction to foreign body inside a cell (at least not in the usual way). A cell hasn't got an immune system of it's own. Of course it has systems capable of expelling foreign/toxic chemicals out of the cell (exocytosis, pinocytosis), but it is altogether different from say your body's reaction to a foreign body. So these microcrystals will probably in some way interfere with the inner working of the cell (it trying to expell it) but they do not neccessarily need to interfere with the actual working of the nucleus.