Assessing The Toxicity Of Pv Coated Magnetite Nanoparticles

Assessing the toxicity of PV-coated magnetite nanoparticles and oil to marine estuarine meiobenthic copepods Amphiascus tenuiremis Amjed Alabresm and Jamie Lead* Center for Environmental Nanoscience and Risk (CENR), Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina 29208, United States AUTHOR INFORMATION Corresponding Author E-mail: jlead@mailbox.sc.edu ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION Oil spills resulting from industrial wastes and maritime disasters have the potential to cause catastrophic damage to aquatic ecosystems. For instance, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 covered an area of approximately 75,000 square kilometers1 , caused severe†¦show more content†¦In addition, burning is not always feasible even for surface oil 10. Dispersants will increase the concentration of oil components such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the water column and can increase toxicity to aquatic organisms11, 12. Although biological methods are completely mineralize oil, it is generally a slow process, taking months to occur13. Due to these limitations of currents traditional methods, new technologies including nanotechnology 14, 15 have been developed. Nanomaterials (NMs) have at least one dimension in the size range of 1 to 100 nm 16 and have novel or unusual size-dependent properties. They have been drawn attention for use in environmental remediation due to their efficiency and effectiveness 17-20, potentially low cost although there are still concerns regarding toxicity other issues. Iron oxide NMs have attracted extensive interest for various applications due to their unique properties such as high specific surface area, superparamagnetism 21, and easy synthesis 22 . More recently, NMs have been tested for oil separation from water to good effect 23-27. Although several of engineered iron oxide NMs have been developed and tested, there are many remaining problems of applicability feasibility, for instance costs and scale-up. To our knowledge, there are no studies assessing the environmental toxicity of such NMs