NTA: Environmental Impact of Nanoparticles

Despite being a relatively new technique, NTA has been recognized as showing promise as an analytical method which could furnish not just information about nanoparticle size and, equally importantly, concentration but that it could do so in complex sample types of high polydispersity (Montes-Burgos et al., 2010; Lynch 2008, Montes-Burgos et al., 2007; Gornati et al., 2009) and that methods such as NTA could be considered as one of a number of means by which the environmental impact and potential cellular toxicity of nanoparticles could be studied in the future (Borm et al., 2006; Tenuta 2008, Tran and Anton, 2009, Kuhlbusch et al., 2010; Hassellöv and Kaegi 2009, Stolpe et al., 2011) and methods to study their effects on other biological barriers have been addressed (Linn et al., 2010). Tran et al. (2011) also developed a hypothetical model for predicting the toxicity of high aspect ratio nanoparticles while Karlsson (2010) compared the comet assay in nanotoxicology research to results obtained by NTA.