Green tea can even make MRI`s sharper

Washington: Green tea has been deemed good for health, skin, brain function etc, and now it is even good for improving the image quality of MRIs.

Sanjay Mathur and colleagues note that recent research has revealed the potential usefulness of nanoparticles, iron oxide in particular, to make biomedical imaging better, but they had have their disadvantages as they tend to cluster together easily and need help getting to their destinations in the body. To address these issues, researchers have recently tried attaching natural nutrients to the nanoparticles.

Mathur's team wanted to see if compounds from green tea, which research suggests has anticancer and anti-inflammatory properties, could play this role.

Using a simple, one-step process, the researchers coated iron-oxide nanoparticles with green-tea compounds called catechins and administered them to mice with cancer. MRIs demonstrated that the novel imaging agents gathered in tumor cells and showed a strong contrast from surrounding non-tumor cells. The researchers conclude that the catechin-coated nanoparticles are promising candidates for use in MRIs and related applications.

The findings are reported in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.