C. elegans-on-a-chip for in situ and in vivo Ag nanoparticles’ uptake and toxicity assay

Abstract

Nanomaterials are extensively used in consumer products and medical applications, but little is known about their environmental and biological toxicities. Moreover, the toxicity analysis requires sophisticated instruments and labor-intensive experiments. Here we report a microfluidic chip incorporated with the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans that rapidly displays the changes in body growth and gene expression specifically responsive to the silver nanoparticles (AgNPs). C. elegans were cultured in microfluidic chambers in the presence or absence of AgNPs and were consequently transferred to wedge-shaped channels, which immobilized the animals, allowing the evaluation of parameters such as length, moving distance, and fluorescence from the reporter gene. The AgNPs reduced the length of C. elegans body, which was easily identified in the channel of chip. In addition, the decrease of body width enabled the worm to advance the longer distance compared to the animal without nanoparticles in a wedge-shaped channel. The transgenic marker DNA, mtl-2::gfp was highly expressed upon the uptake of AgNPs, resulting in green fluorescence emission. The comparative investigation using gold nanoparticles and heavy-metal ions indicated that these parameters are specific to AgNPs. These results demonstrate that C. elegans-on-a-chip has a great potential as a rapid and specific nanoparticle detection or nanotoxicity assessment system.

Green synthesized silver nanoparticles demonstrating enhanced in vitro and in vivo antibiofilm activity against Candida spp.

“…C. elegans is a simple nematode which has several experimental advantages to study the toxicity and pathogenicity of microbes at in vivo condition . Particularly, C. elegans is used to study the toxic effect of AgNPs due to its rapid changes in body growth and fast response to AgNPs . In this study, C. elegans is able to survive up to 175–180 h upon treatment with DV‐AgNPs and HS‐AgNPs and thereby proves the nontoxic effect of AgNPs.…”

The Current Understanding of Autophagy in Nanomaterial Toxicity and Its Implementation in Safety Assessment-Related Alternative Testing Strategies

“…Studies show that treatment of quantum dots (QDs), gold nanoparticles (AuNPs), and carbon dots (CDs) are able to induce massive autophagosome formation, autophagy related gene upregulation, and autophagy substrate degradation in cultured HeLa cells and in live C. elegans [64]. Due to the small size of C. elegans, it is very easy to track the autophagosome formation in real-time by simply using the fluorescence microscopy [69], making C. elegans a suitable model organism for the alternative nanotoxicity approach and providing great connection between in vitro and in vivo toxicity [69].…”

High‐throughput COPAS assay for screening of developmental and reproductive toxicity of nanoparticles using the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans

“…In recent years, the incorporation of COPAS assays has been attempted in toxicological screening studies (Pulak, ). The results of these studies showed that COPAS is a suitable and reliable system for assaying the changes in mitochondrial morphology and activity (Daniele et al, ; Hunt, Olejnik, Bailey, Vaught, & Sprando, ), heavy metal toxicity (Hunt, Olejnik, & Sprando, ), toxicity assessment of neurotoxicants (Boyd, et al, ), and environmental toxicants (Boyd, McBride, Rice, Snyder, & Freedman, (), and enables the screening of drug libraries (Cho, Behnam Azad, Luyt, & Lewis, ), metal NMs (Jeong et al, ; Kim et al, ) and phenotype profiling of C. elegans in different chemical environments (Gao et al, ). However, COPAS has several limitations.…”