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A majorproblem associated with nitric oxide (NO) donors is therelease of the desired amount of NO at a specific site. A number ofplatforms have been developed for the regulation of NO dosage. Wepresent the use of citrate-stabilized gold nanoparticles as a platformto regulate NO release. Because of the affinity between gold and thiols,the characteristic −S–NO bond of S-nitrosothiols(RSNOs) breaks in the presence of gold nanoparticles, thereby releasingNO and modifying the gold nanoparticle surface with the correspondingthiol. This system allows for surface-controlled NO release, wherethe amount of NO released is proportional to the number of thiolsbound to the gold nanoparticle surface. Moreover, by employing anamperometric technique to detect the maximum NO release, we were ableto estimate the stoichiometry of the reaction, that is, the numberof adsorbed RSNO molecules per gold nanoparticle. A kinetic modelfor NO release and its subsequent decomposition is proposed and usedto fit the experimental results. The reaction was found to be zeroth-and first-order with respect to RSNO and gold nanoparticles, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]