Introducing MINChar—a new community initiative to support effective material characterization in nanotoxicity studies.
Here’s a tough one: Imagine you have a new substance—call it substance X—and you run some tests to see how toxic it is. But you’re not quite sure what substance X is.
You know that it is a powder, and it is supposed to have chemicals x y and z somewhere in it. But you don’t know how small the particles are, what shape they are, whether chemical z is on the surface of the particles or inside them, whether the particles all clump together when shoved into the test system or whether they can’t get far enough away from each other after being administered, or whether there is something else present in substance X that really shouldn’t be there.
Now imagine your tests show that substance X looks like it could be rather dangerous. How do identify which aspect of the material is causing the problem, so you can go about fixing it?
Or imagine someone else wants to repeat your work. Or they want to compare your data with another study. How do you know that the substance being used in other studies is the same as substance X, and not simply a crude approximation?
The scenario is somewhat hypothetical, but the issues are very real. And they have dogged the field of nanotoxicology for over a decade. Read the rest of this entry »