Thousands of consumer products containing engineered nanoparticles — microscopic particles found in everyday items from cosmetics and clothing to building materials — enter the market every year. Concerns about possible environmental health and safety issues with these nano-enabled products continue to grow, with scientists struggling to come up with fast, cheap, and easy-to-use cellular screening systems to identify possible hazards of vast libraries of engineered nanomaterials. However, determining how much exposure to engineered nanoparticles could be unsafe for humans requires precise knowledge of the amount (or dose) of nanomaterials interacting with cells and tissues such as lungs and skin. This is easy to determine with chemicals, but the challenge presented by nanoparticles suspended in physiological media is not trivial. Engineered nanoparticles in biological media interact with serum proteins and form larger agglomerates, which alter both their so-called effective density and active surface area, and ultimately define their delivery to cell dose and bio-interactions. This behavior has tremendous implications not only in measuring the exact amount of nanomaterials interacting with cells and tissue, but also in defining hazard rankings of various engineered nanomaterials (ENMs). As a result, thousands of published cellular screening assays are difficult to interpret and use for risk
The post Researchers develop technique to measure quantity, risks of engineered nanomaterials delivered to cells has been published on Technology Org.
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