Species-specific toxicity of copper nanoparticles among mammalian and piscine cell lines

Abstract

The four copper nanoparticles (CuNPs) with the size of 25, 50, 78 and 100 nm and one type of micron-sized particles (MPs) (∼500 nm) were exposed to two mammalian (H4IIE and HepG2) and two piscine (PLHC-1 and RTH-149) cell lines to test the species-specific toxicities of CuNPs. The results showed that the morphologies, ion release and size of the particles all played an important role when investigating the toxicity. Furthermore, the authors found that the particle forms of CuNPs in suspensions highly contribute to the toxicity in all exposed cell lines whereas copper ions (Cu²⁺) only caused significant responses in mammalian cell lines, indicating the species-specific toxicity of CuNPs. This study revealed that the morphologies, ion release rate of NPs as well as the species-specific vulnerabilities of cells should all be considered when explaining and extrapolating toxicity test results among particles and among species.

Keywords::

• copper nanoparticles
• mammalian and fish cell lines
• size and morphology of NPs
• species-specific cytotoxicity
• reactive oxygen species

Acknowledgements

L Song and M Connolly have contributed equally to this work. Both of them are sponsored by the Environmental ChemOinformatics Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ECO-ITN) within the seventh research framework programme of the European Union (238701). MG Vijver is supported via VENI grant (863.08.023) awarded by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Part of the work was performed within the framework of the RIVM sponsored project “IRAN” and the INIA project AT2011-0001.