A key aspect of any biological application of nanomaterials is to understand what happens when they are introduced into biological environments. When particles are introduced into blood plasma they are rapidly coated with a "corona" of adsorbed proteins. This profoundly affects the surface properties of the particles and the way they are perceived by the biological system. The main aim of the wider research project is to uderstand this process and learn how it can be beneficially manipulated. The objectives of this study are:¿ To define the thickness of the polymer coating layer for a range of nano-materials designed to give different surface properties (positive charge, negative charge, neutral steric stabilisation).¿ To study the formation of the protein corona in human plasma on our polymer-coated nanoparticles as a function of nanoparticle composition and surface chemistry