Nanomaterial Cytotoxicity

Nanomaterials have become a growing part of society and technology with the growing number of commercial products and research focuses both in industry and academia. The synthesis of such materials has been the focus of many research efforts while the research into nanomaterials' health effects have just started receiving much more attention. In the past few years, researchers have begun to study the cytotoxicity of nanomaterials; it has been found that some material do show toxicological effects in mammalian cells (i.e. cell death, genotoxicity). One of the efforts in our research group has been to establish an optimized screening protocol to assay the cytotoxicity of synthetic nanomaterials in a fairly generalized way. The goal of this undergraduate research was to establish a good working protocol for assessing cell viability and cytotoxicity in a relatively short time (e.g. one or two days). The main biochemical assay used to determine the cytotoxicity of synthetic nanomaterials we prepared in our group was the water soluble tetrazolium salt 8 (WST-8) assay which is available commercially. The cell lines BV2 (microglia) and SH-SY5Y (neuroblastoma) were used as the model systems to determine the cytotoxicity of two different nanomaterials having different levels of crystallinity. We will present cytotoxicity assay results using two different cell concentrations and four different particle concentrations per well in 96-well plates. The results suggest that cytotoxicities of the particular cell lines from the brain are dependent on the crystallinity of the surface exposed TiO2<./sub> nanoparticles and the cell plating concentration. The nanomaterials were synthesized by a fellow INSET intern student (Mr. Jason Bedford).