AgNP is one of the fastest growing nanomaterials with wide range of applications such as cosmetics, drug delivery and electronics. Its usage is often attributed to silver's anti-microbial properties. Despite emerging applications, information about its toxicity is still lacking. This deficiency of rigorous toxicity studies makes AgNP prone to catastrophic failure in their potentially important applications.  As such, we performed combined computational and experimental studies on the effect of AgNP to HepG2 cells. Using DFT, we investigated the interactions between Ag, Ag+ and HepG2 cell membrane.   DFT results show that binding interaction of cells with Ag+ is stronger than Ag. Moreover, TDDFT results show that absorption spectroscopy can be used to detect the presence of Ag but not Ag+. Experimentally, we used cell viability, TEM, oxidative stress and protein extraction experiments to determine how citrate stabilized AgNP affects HepG2 cells. Experimental results show that toxic dosage is  > 1.5 ppm.

Computational and experimental studies on the toxicity of AgNP to HepG2 cells

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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