Nanoparticles as a potential teratogen: a lesson learnt from fruit fly

ABSTARCT

Nanoparticles (NPs) have revolutionized the society being a part of numerous products of day to day uses. However, its potential to act as an adverse entity was greatly ignored. Recently, the toxic effect of nanoparticles on biological system is checked using various model organisms. Among various models fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has turned up as a promising model since numerous diseased genes and signalling pathways are similar to that of a human being. Effects of many NPs were tested using Drosophila, and results suggest the deleterious effect of NPs on the various physiological system. NPs cause defects in genetic, molecular, phenotypic, developmental as well as behavioral level in Drosophila. Any chemical compounds that can cause abnormalities in offspring when ingested in prenatal stages are known as teratogens. In this review, we have summerized the toxic effect generated by NPs tested using Drosophila model and propose NPs as a teratogen.

Keywords:

• Nanoparticles
• teratogens
• toxicity
• behavioral teratogenesis
• Drosophila

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments which help to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by DBT–Government of India to MM via grants no BT/PR21857/NNT/28/1238/2017.