Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry and Institute of Chemical and Bioengineering, ETH Zurich, Wolfgang-Pauli Strasse 10, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland.
Environ Sci Technol. 2010 Nov 15;44(22):8718-23. doi: 10.1021/es101685f. Epub 2010 Oct 21.
The rapidly increasing production of engineered nanoparticles has raised questions regarding their environmental impact and their mobility to overcome biological important barriers. Nanoparticles were found to cross different mammalian barriers, which is summarized under the term translocation. The present work investigates the uptake and translocation of cerium dioxide nanoparticles into maize plants as one of the major agricultural crops. Nanoparticles were exposed either as aerosol or as suspension. Our study demonstrates that 50 μg of cerium/g of leaves was either adsorbed or incorporated into maize leaves. This amount could not be removed by a washing step and did not depend on closed or open stomata investigated under dark and light exposure conditions. However, no translocation into newly grown leaves was found when cultivating the maize plants after airborne particle exposure. The use of inductively coupled mass spectrometer allowed detection limits of less than 1 ng of cerium/g of leaf. Exposure of plants to well-characterized nanoparticle suspensions in the irrigation water resulted also in no detectable translocation. These findings may indicate that the biological barriers of plants are more resistant against nanoparticle translocation than mammalian barriers.
随着工程纳米粒子产量的迅速增加，人们对其环境影响及其克服生物重要障碍的迁移能力产生了疑问。研究发现纳米粒子能够穿透不同的哺乳动物屏障，这一过程被概括为转位。本研究以玉米作为主要农作物之一，探讨了二氧化铈纳米粒子的摄取和转位。纳米粒子以气溶胶或悬浮液的形式暴露。研究表明，50μg的铈/克叶片被吸附或整合到玉米叶片中。这一数量不能通过洗涤步骤去除，也不依赖于在黑暗和光照条件下研究的关闭或开放的气孔。然而，当在空气中颗粒暴露后种植玉米时，没有发现新生长的叶片中有转位。电感耦合质谱仪的使用允许检测到低于 1ng/g 叶片的铈含量。将植物暴露于灌溉水中经过良好表征的纳米粒子悬浮液中，也没有检测到可转移的铈。这些发现可能表明，与哺乳动物屏障相比，植物的生物屏障更能抵抗纳米粒子的转位。
