Chemometric Evaluation of the Link between Acute Toxicity, Health Issues and Physicochemical Properties of Silver Nanoparticles

Abstract

The present study’s objective is to focus on some developments in the field of statistical models of a complex system, like nanoparticles responses in the environmental media. An important problem that still needs to be studied and interpreted is the relations between physicochemical parameters of the nanoparticles like primary size, primary hydrophobic diameter, zeta potential, etc. with respective toxicity values. It holds true especially for silver nanoparticle systems due to their known bactericidal effect and wide distribution in practice. The present study deals with the data for physicochemical and toxicity parameters of 94 different silver nanoparticle systems in order to reveal specific relations between physicochemical properties and acute toxicity readings using multivariate statistical methods. Searching for these specific relationships between physicochemical parameters and toxicity responses is the novel element in the present study. This has focused our study toward developing a model that describes the relationship between physicochemical properties and toxicity of silver NPs based on a dataset gathered from the literature. It is shown that the systems studied could be divided into four patterns (clusters) of similarity depending not only on the physicochemical indicators related to particles size but also by their acute toxicity. The acute toxicity is strongly correlated to the zeta potential of the particles if the whole data set is considered.

Keywords

• nanoparticles
• silver
• physicochemical properties
• acute toxicity
• chemometrics