As carbon nanomaterials steadily make their way into commercial products, it is important to produce nontoxic nanotubes and to assess their toxicity at the organismal level. This work reports the synthesis and characterization of cysteine-functionalized single-walled carbon nanotubes and the usefulness of toxicity tests on the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans. Caenorhabditis elegans is a useful test subject because about 60-80% of its genome is homologous to human genes. Additionally, 12 of 17 epigenetic marks and signal transduction pathways are conserved in humans and ?C. elegans.? We report that the cysteine-functionalized carbon nanotubes have good water solubility and exhibit no acute or chronic toxicity toward C. elegans. Furthermore, the cysteine-functionalized nanotubes are shown to be capable of delivering an antiviral drug via a cleavable disulfide bond.  This work demonstrates the biocompatibility of cysteine-functionalized nanotubes and introduces the usefulness of C. elegans as a model organism for testing the toxicity of carbon nanotubes.

Assessment of the toxicity of cysteine-functionalized single-walled carbon nanotubes using the model organism <i>Caenorhabditis elegans</i>

248th National Meeting (2014)

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Assessment of the toxicity of cysteine-functionalized single-walled carbon nanotubes using the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans