Supporting information A novel albumin nanocomplex containing both small interfering RNA and gold nanorods enables synergetic anticancer therapeutics by employing both thermal ablation and RNA interference

A novel albumin nanocomplex containing both small interfering RNA and gold nanorods enables synergetic anticancer therapeutics by employing both thermal ablation and RNA interference Characterization of BSA Nanoparticles: To optimize the conditions for particle synthesis, the effect of pH prior to the addition of ethanol was investigated. As shown in Figure S1, an increased pH resulted in a decreased amount of BSA particles with a more negative surface charge. With respect to cellular uptake efficiency and the successful encapsulation of both siRNA and AuNRs, BSA nanoparticle synthesis was found to be optimal at pH 6. The concentration of synthetic particles was measured by manually counting the number of BSA particles using TEM images (Figure S2). To ensure accuracy, five representative images were obtained at three different concentrations (1/5, 1/25, and 1/125 dilutions of the original 20 mg/ml solution). The numbers of synthetic particles were calculated from the ratio of the area of each image to that of the TEM grid. Determination of the Method for Rod Encapsulation in the BSA complexes: To determine the most efficient synthetic method for rod encapsulation, desolvation was first performed by Electronic Supplementary Material (ESI) for Nanoscale.