Multifaceted toxicity assessment of catalyst composites in transgenic zebrafish embryos

Recent development in the field of nanomaterials has given rise into the inquiries regarding the toxicological characteristics of the nanomaterials. While many individual nanomaterials have been screened for their toxicological effects, composites that accompany nanomaterials are not common subjects to such screening through toxicological assessment. One of the widely used composites that accompany nanomaterials is catalyst composite used to reduce air pollution, which was selected as a target composite with nanomaterials for the multifaceted toxicological assessment. As existing studies did not possess any significant data regarding such catalyst composites, this study focuses on investigating toxicological characteristics of catalyst composites from various angles in both in-vitro and in-vivo settings. Initial toxicological assessment on catalyst composites was conducted using HUVECs for cell viability assays, and subsequent in-vivo assay regarding their direct influence on living organisms was done. The zebrafish embryo and its transgenic lines were used in the in-vivo assays to obtain multifaceted analytic results. Data obtained from the in-vivo assays include blood vessel formation, mutated heart morphology, and heart functionality change. Our multifaceted toxicological assessment pointed out that chemical composites augmented with nanomaterials can too have toxicological threat as much as individual nanomaterials do and alarms us with their danger. This manuscript provides a multifaceted assessment for composites augmented with nanomaterials, of which their toxicological threats have been overlooked. - Highlights: • A multifaceted toxicological analysis was demonstrated with catalyst composites. • Three catalyst composites containing Ag, Au, and Pt nanoparticles were toxicologically compared. • HUVECs were employed for preliminary in-vitro tests. • Transgenic zebrafish embryos were employed for subsequent detailed in-vivo tests. • Standardized toxicity test should screen for commercial usage of such composites. - The toxicity of composites that accompany nanomaterials, such as catalyst composites, is investigated from various angles including in-vivo setting via multifaceted toxicity assessment with transgenic zebrafish embryos.