Hydrothermal synthesis of halloysite nanotubes @carbon nanocomposites with good biocompatibility

In this work, the halloysite nanotubes@carbon (HNTs@C) nanocomposites are synthesized by one-step hydrothermal carbonization of glucose on the surface of HNTs. HNTs can effectively induce heterogeneous deposition of carbonaceous materials on their surfaces, which leads to a layer of amorphous carbon around HNTs. The HNTs@C was characterized by transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The influence of glucose loading and reaction time on the structure of nanocomposite was investigated. The thickness of carbon on the surface of HNTs increases with the increase of glucose loading and reaction time. The bovine serum albumin adsorption experiments show that HNTs@C has stronger protein adsorption ability than raw HNTs. Hemolysis experiments show that HNTs@C exhibits decreased hemolysis rate in comparison to HNTs. The in vitro cell culture experiments using HeLa cells reveal that HNTs@C has lower cytotoxicity than raw HNTs. All of these indicate that HNTs@C has good adsorption capacity and biocompatibility, and they have potential applications in biomedical areas such as drug delivery carrier.