Influence of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) to human cell

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been attracting increasing attention for the possibilities of their widespread applications and many studies have been conducted for their development. On the other hand, the research on the influence of CNTs on human organisms is still scarce and some show concerns about genotoxicity or cytotoxicity. Therefore, in this research, we are proposing a new way of biocompatibility evaluation for CNTs by examining the relation between biocompatibility and structure of CNTs. In our cytotoxicity tests, neither chromosome abnormality nor DNA damages occurred evaluated by Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorting (FACS) analysis. However, some significance were assessed for cell proliferation and viability. It is also clear that CNTs showed adherence to cell, since efficiency of cell ablation by trypsin decreased dramatically in CNTs dishes. Those phenomenon were observed especially between control and semiconducting CNTs. We found out that CNTs have high possibility in creating structural feature of adherence strongly with cells by increasing affinity and adherence property. That indicates CNTs have combined with cells either physically or chemically and expressed in cell proliferation, viability and trypsin inhibitory.