Issue 3, 2023

Metal and metal oxide nanoparticle toxicity: moving towards a more holistic structure–activity approach

Abstract

The recent emergence of nanotechnology has led to the rapid increase of intentional and unintentional exposure to engineered nanoparticles (NPs), raising concerns over their impact on humans, animals and ecosystems. The demanding experimental assessment of toxicity, compared with NP innovation and time to market, has led to the extensive development of in silico methods, such as SAR models, aiming at providing a more rapid toxicity screening of such NPs. However, such models are usually built upon a limited number of data, making the different approaches case-sensitive. Furthermore, the focus on the predictive capabilities of the models, deem the extraction of scientific knowledge secondary, hindering the mechanistic understanding of toxicity mechanisms. In this paper, we instead shift the focus by using the models as a first step towards induction and extraction of valuable mechanistic information, once the predictive ability of the model has been validated. For this reason, we use a large dataset consisting of 935 toxicity measurements for 45 metal and metal oxide NPs, to build classification nano-SAR models. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the largest dataset of individual toxicity measurements for such NPs. Although the dataset is heterogeneous, the models developed are able to accurately classify the NPs based on their toxicity towards a variety of cells and organisms, using the same descriptors. Based on the quality of the results, the potential mechanisms of toxicity are identified and discussed in depth, providing a more holistic approach towards metal and metal oxide NP toxicity. The presented approach aims to trigger a discussion regarding information that could be derived from nano-SAR models, that could pave the way towards a more knowledge-based risk assessment of NPs and guide researchers towards the synthesis of safe-by-design NPs.

Graphical abstract: Metal and metal oxide nanoparticle toxicity: moving towards a more holistic structure–activity approach

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
29 Seb 2022
Accepted
26 Jan 2023
First published
30 Jan 2023
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Environ. Sci.: Nano, 2023,10, 761-780

Metal and metal oxide nanoparticle toxicity: moving towards a more holistic structure–activity approach

G. P. Gakis, I. G. Aviziotis and C. A. Charitidis, Environ. Sci.: Nano, 2023, 10, 761 DOI: 10.1039/D2EN00897A

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements