Copper oxide nanoparticle toxicity profiling using untargeted metabolomics.

Background The rapidly increasing number of engineered nanoparticles (NPs), and products containing NPs, raises concerns for human exposure and safety. With this increasing, and ever changing, catalogue of NPs it is becoming more difficult to adequately assess the toxic potential of new materials in a timely fashion. It is therefore important to develop methods which can provide high-throughput screening of biological responses. The use of omics technologies, including metabolomics, can play a vital role in this process by providing relatively fast, comprehensive, and cost-effective assessment of cellular responses. These techniques thus provide the opportunity to identify specific toxicity pathways and to generate hypotheses on how to reduce or abolish toxicity.