Environmental chemist flashes warning light on new nanoparticle

said braka 12:17 AM
"I am not only a soil chemist, but an environmental

chemist," he notes. "As agricultural scientists, we are very familiar with phosphorous but I had never heard of two-dimensional black phosphorous. So we read all the nice papers about black phosphorous, and then, as environmental chemists, we started asking about nanoparticle toxicity. You have to be careful where you put such materials in the human body."
In a recent cover story of the journal, Small, his former postdoctoral fellow, Qing Zhao, currently a professor at the Institute of Applied Ecology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Xing report toxicity test results for different thicknesses of layered BP in three cell lines. Briefly, they found disruption of cell  related to layered BP particle size, plus concentration- and cell-type-dependent cytotoxicity.
Xing says, "We are among the first ones to work with this material, particularly in regard to its environmental implications." He and colleagues urge that "an in-depth understanding of BP's cytotoxicity is of utmost importance" to provide useful data for risk evaluation and safe biomedical applications.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-08-environmental-chemist-nanoparticle.html#jCp