Toxicity and Risk Assessment of Nanomaterials

Introduction

Every technology has two sides like that of a coin, one is the substantial beneficial roles and on the other hand, it gives birth to a few limitations as well as negatives (Khan et al., 2020). The nanoscience and nanotechnology deal with nanometers (nm) and the size of typical potent nanomaterials (NMs) is 100nm (Chakravorty et al., 2020a). Nanomaterials of all 0D, 1D, 2D, and 3D dimensions are mainly two types, i.e. carbon and metal NMs (Chakravorty et al., 2020a). In last few decades several scientific reports have been reported that all kinds of NMs as potent antimicrobial agents (Chakravorty et al., 2020b), drug delivery agent (Raghavan et al., 2020; Deb et al., 2017), anticancer agent (Deb et al., 2018), cosmetics (Ahmad et al., 2019). The same material has been also enhanced textile industry as processing agent (Singh et al., 2020), agriculture industry as a biofertilizer (Boutchuen et al., 2019), the electrochemical industry mainly for batter energy storage device (Velappan et al., 2020); this material dramatically changed the current landscape of phytoremediation (Das et al., 2015; Das et al., 2013) and so many scenarios just because of their unique physical and chemical nature (Paul et al., 2020). However, there is a huge chance to get exposed to the producers, environment, workers and consumers during the production and preparation of NM (Savolainen et al., 2010; Valsami et al., 2015). While NM is increasingly work-related, as seen as indirect means by the range of nano-enabled products available in the market, as stated. In 2004, Germany registered 20,000 to 114,000 workers in 450 different nanotechnology companies (Pietroiusti et al., 2018). Everywhere the results of these kinds of exposure cannot be evaluated or predicted with the help of the current knowledge, because of fewer identification characteristics on the molecular level and hence any biological system may undergo disturbance. To overcome the problem some novel attributes need to be evolved to predict nanoscale materials (Kinaret et al., 2017). Across the globe several scientific projects are underway to develop such kind of predictions tools (Pietroiusti et al., 2018).