10th International Aerosol Conference
September 2 - September 7, 2018
America's Center Convention Complex
St. Louis, Missouri, USA

Abstract View


Non-additive Effects of the Mixture of Metals and Organic Compounds to Mammalian Cell Cytotoxicity of Particulate Matter (PM)

YIXIANG WANG, Michael Plewa, Vishal Verma, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

     Abstract Number: 1004
     Working Group: Aerosols and Health - Connecting the Dots

Abstract
The adverse health effects of particulate matter (PM), including the PM-catalyzed biological generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), have been widely studied. Due to the complexity of PM chemical compositions, generally pure chemicals (e.g., standard organic and metals solutions) are studied to assess the toxic effect of PM components. However, the applicability of these methods to understand the interactions among the PM components has not been validated. To address these questions, we selected several metals (Cu, Fe, Mn) that are related to the oxidative potential (OP) of PM and assessed their interactions with the organic compounds in inducing the toxicity. Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells were used for assessing the cytotoxicity of the PM. Metals constitute one of the most toxic fractions of ambient PM. Our preliminary tests showed that after removing the metals from the PM matrix using Chelex column, the toxicity decreased from 90% to 20%. Therefore, an artificial metals mixture was prepared in the same concentration as the hydrophilic fraction (rich in metals) of the PM extract, but it expressed much lower toxicity than the PM samples, indicating some interaction of metals with the organic compounds for inducing the toxicity. We also plan to measure the OP of metals and PM samples in the same cytotoxicity level by dithiothreitol (DTT) consumption, and •OH generation in surrogate lung fluid (SLF) and DTT assays to investigate the differences of pure components and mixtures in ROS generation. Our study highlights the need to account for the interactions between organic compounds and metals while apportioning the relative contributions of chemical components in the PM toxicity.