(24g) Synthesis of Traceable Nanoparticles to Enable the Study of the Fate and Transport of Engineered Nanomaterials

Engineered nanomaterials hold great promise for technological innovation due to unique properties that emerge at the nanoscale. As a result, nanomaterials are increasingly being incorporated into consumer products ranging from electronics to cosmetics, and are being evaluated for novel drug delivery and treatment of contaminated water. Unfortunately, the boom in nanoscience and nanotechnology research has not been accompanied by an equal effort investigating the environmental implications of nanomaterials and little is known about the prevalence, behavior and risks of nanomaterials in the environment. Concerns about the environmental health and safety aspects of nanomaterials are global: production, distribution, use and disposal of nanoparticles will undoubtedly result in their wide release into the environment. It is therefore imperative that methodology to track specific nanomaterials through the environment be developed.

A major difficulty is the fact that at present, very few analytical techniques are capable of unambiguously identifying and characterizing nanomaterials in environmental matrices, especially when nanoparticles composed entirely of elements with high environmental background concentrations are concerned. We have worked to develop methodology to prepare nanoparticles labeled with elements present in low background concentrations in the environment (e.g., lanthanides, gold, etc) where the concentration of the tracer element can therefore be used as a proxy identifier for the presence of the nanoparticles.

We will present our initial results and observations in this work.