Assessing toxicity of carbon based nanoparticles in cells and zebrafish by using biospectroscopy
Raman and infrared (IR) spectroscopies provide detailed information about biological constituents such as lipids, proteins, carbohydrates and DNA/RNA, etc. Based on this, these techniques can be used to differentiate cells and tissues, as well as employed as a diagnostic tool for detecting post-exposure biochemical alterations in toxicity assessment due to the induced changes of chemical composition and structure reflected by their spectral properties. Over the past few decades, Raman and IR spectroscopies with the development of more sophisticated instruments can provide high-resolution spectral data from heterogeneous biological samples, which consisting of large amount of biochemical information, is complex. Therefore, computational analysis is employed to process and analyse the data for obtaining meaningful information and getting deeper insight into the wavenumbers-related biochemical alterations. Carbon-based nanoparticles (CNPs) are most widely used novel nanomaterials. With their widespread application, concerns emerge on their potential risk to the health of organism and human, and investigation on their possible toxicity is urgently required. This thesis is contributing to the toxicity assessment of CNPs by using spectroscopic techniques coupled with computational analysis. Findings from our projects indicated that this approach has the capability of detecting the CNPsinduced biochemical alterations both in vitro and in vivo, which implies that techniques involved in IR and Raman spectroscopy can provide a rapid and highly sensitive tool to detect minimal changes at the subcellular level.
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