To help determine the environmental impact of nanomaterials, researchers have created a “library of properties” to aid in this process.
While nanomaterials have revolutionized our lives and helped many industries, there are still concerns about potential adverse effects. These include toxic accumulations in various organs or indirect impacts from co-pollutant transport.
NanoSolveIT, a European Union-funded project, is creating a groundbreaking computer-based Integrated Approach to Testing and Assessment. (IATA) This approach is for assessing and monitoring the safety and environmental health of nanomaterials.
Researchers from the University of Birmingham worked closely with NovaMechanics experts in Nicosia, Cyprus, over the past two years to create a decision-support system that can be used as both stand-alone software and a Cloud platform.
The team developed a freely available cloud library. It contains a complete physicochemical characterization of 69 nanomaterials. Additionally, it includes calculated molecular descriptions to increase the information’s value. Details of this project are available in NanoImpact.
Professor Iseult, Lynch from the University of Birmingham, commented, “one of the limits to widespread use of computer-based methods is the absence of large, well-organized, high-quality datasets or data with sufficient metadata to allow dataset interoperability and the combination of them to create larger datasets.”
“Making available the library of experimental and calculated descriptors to the community, along with a detailed description of how they were calculated, is a key step towards filling this data gap.”
The fifth web-based, freely-available application the project developed is the cloud-based nanomaterials library.
NovaMechanics’ Antreas Afantitis commented that NanoSolveIT is one of the most active projects in nanomaterials safety, informatics, and information.
There are concerns about nanomaterials as product development is slowing down. This is because current methods of assessing exposure, hazards, and risk are costly, time-consuming, and often involve testing in animal models. These are the challenges that NanoSolveIT aims to solve.
This latest research aims to enhance our knowledge about nanomaterials properties and the link between properties and (cytotoxic) effect. This dataset includes over 70 descriptors for each nanomaterial.
This dataset was used to develop a computer-based workflow that predicts nanomaterials’ effective surface charges (zeta-potential). It is based on a collection of descriptors that can help to design safer and more functional nanomaterials.
To ensure that the model’s predictive read-across is accessible to all, it has been made public and freely available via the web service through Horizon 2020 (H2020), the NanoCommons project, and the H2020 NanoSolveIT Cloud Platform to ensure its accessibility to the community as well as interested parties.
The complete data set is also available through the NanoPharos Database. This is because the project consortium supports FAIR data principles, which commit to making its data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
