Understanding Cytotoxicity of Engineered Nanomaterials

Abstract

The goal of this paper is understand cytotoxicity of different engineered nanomaterials when exposed to different humanrelevant cell types. The objective is to address few critical questions in nanotoxicity, namely variation of cytotoxicity with cell type, nanomaterial uptake and cytotoxicity response to varying physiochemical properties. We find that silica nanoparticles to be non-toxic to both cells lines and at the tested doses, while both ZnO nanoparticles and Au nanorods were observed to be toxic at certain doses and time-points. We also observed initial evidence to demonstrate cell penetration and cell wall morphological alterations after Au and ZnO nanoparticles exposure.