Abstract
The increasing production and use of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) inevitably results in their higher concentrations in the environment. This may lead to undesirable environmental effects and thus warrants risk assessment. The ecotoxicity testing of a wide variety of ENMs rapidly evolving in the market is costly but also ethically questionable when bioassays with vertebrates are conducted. Therefore, alternative methods, e.g., models for predicting toxicity mechanisms of ENMs based on their physico-chemical properties (e.g., quantitative (nano)structure-activity relationships, QSARs/QNARs), should be developed. While the development of such models relies on good-quality experimental toxicity data, most of the available data in the literature even for the same test species are highly variable. In order to map and analyse the state of the art of the existing nanoecotoxicological information suitable for QNARs, we created a database NanoE-Tox that is available as Supporting Information File 1. The database is based on existing literature on ecotoxicology of eight ENMs with different chemical composition: carbon nanotubes (CNTs), fullerenes, silver (Ag), titanium dioxide (TiO2), zinc oxide (ZnO), cerium dioxide (CeO2), copper oxide (CuO), and iron oxide (FeOx; Fe2O3, Fe3O4). Altogether, NanoE-Tox database consolidates data from 224 articles and lists altogether 1,518 toxicity values (EC50/LC50/NOEC) with corresponding test conditions and physico-chemical parameters of the ENMs as well as reported toxicity mechanisms and uptake of ENMs in the organisms. 35% of the data in NanoE-Tox concerns ecotoxicity of Ag NPs, followed by TiO2 (22%), CeO2 (13%), and ZnO (10%). Most of the data originates from studies with crustaceans (26%), bacteria (17%), fish (13%), and algae (11%). Based on the median toxicity values of the most sensitive organism (data derived from three or more articles) the toxicity order was as follows: Ag > ZnO > CuO > CeO2 > CNTs > TiO2 > FeOx. We believe NanoE-Tox database contains valuable information for ENM environmental hazard estimation and development of models for predicting toxic potential of ENMs.
Highlights
The production and use of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) in consumer products is increasing rapidly [1]
A search performed on March 19, 2015 in Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS) with the keywords chosen based on Aitken et al [3] and Bondarenko et al [4] and listed in Table S1 (Supporting Information File 1) revealed that the majority of the papers concerned the applications of carbon nanotubes (36,609 papers, 40%), followed by Ag nanoparticles (NPs; 16,970, 19%), TiO2 NPs (11,802, 13%), and iron oxide NPs (10,479, 11%) while the most common fields of application were sensors (28,027 papers, 31%), catalysis (10,435, 11%) and drug delivery (8,838, 10%) (Figure 1, Table S1, Supporting Information File 1)
NanoE-Tox database that is available as Supporting Information File 2 of this paper is the first online-available database that contains in-depth nanoecotoxicological information on eight ENMs accompanied by considerable amount of information on ENM physico-chemical properties, testing conditions and, to some extent, on mechanisms of toxic action
Summary
The production and use of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) in consumer products is increasing rapidly [1]. The number of published articles could serve as a good indicator of the potential future use of ENMs. A search performed on March 19, 2015 in Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS) with the keywords chosen based on Aitken et al [3] and Bondarenko et al [4] and listed in Table S1 (Supporting Information File 1) revealed that the majority of the papers concerned the applications of carbon nanotubes (36,609 papers, 40%), followed by Ag nanoparticles (NPs; 16,970, 19%), TiO2 NPs (11,802, 13%), and iron oxide NPs (10,479, 11%) while the most common fields of application were sensors (28,027 papers, 31%), catalysis (10,435, 11%) and drug delivery (8,838, 10%) (Figure 1, Table S1, Supporting Information File 1). The risks caused by ENMs both to humans and the environment need to be assessed [6]
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