In vitro toxicity assessment of atmospheric particulate matter on human lung and hepatic cells with agar membrane-based sampling and exposure strategy

ABSTRACT

In vitro toxicology research into the health effects of atmospheric particulate matter (PM) depends on the extraction of PM from filters. Previously, we proposed an efficient PM sampling and extraction method based on low-cost agar membrane and performed an exposure study with RAW264.7 macrophages. Here, we extended the application of this strategy, employing lung and hepatic cells, to validate its reliability and reproducibility. One traditional strategy using polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) filter was adopted for comparison. Cytotoxicity and proteomics results showed that the PM extracted by two methods induced comparable toxicity to A549 and BEAS-2B cells, while the PM extracted from the agar membranes induced higher toxicity to HepG2 and HL7702 cells than that from the PTFE filters. The differences in the investigations might be associated with the cell's sensitivity to the extracted suspended particles. This work indicated the importance of assessing PM cytotoxicity from the perspective of extraction methods and cell lines.

KEYWORDS:

• Atmospheric particulate matter
• agar membrane
• lung cells
• hepatic cells
• cytotoxicity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/26395940.2023.2233699

Data availability statement

All data reported here can be made available on request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (91643105, 91543129, 21874065, 22176085), and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20181261).