Effect of the Albumin Corona on the Toxicity of Combined Graphene Oxide and Cadmium to Daphnia magna and Integration of the Datasets into the NanoCommons Knowledge Base

Abstract

In this work, we evaluated the effect of protein corona formation on graphene oxide (GO) mixture toxicity testing (i.e., co-exposure) using the Daphnia magna model and assessing acute toxicity determined as immobilisation. Cadmium (Cd2+) and bovine serum albumin (BSA) were selected as co-pollutant and protein model system, respectively. Albumin corona formation on GO dramatically increased its colloidal stability (ca. 60%) and Cd2+ adsorption capacity (ca. 4.5 times) in reconstituted water (Daphnia medium). The acute toxicity values (48 h-EC50) observed were 0.18 mg L−1 for Cd2+-only and 0.29 and 0.61 mg L−1 following co-exposure of Cd2+ with GO and BSA@GO materials, respectively, at a fixed non-toxic concentration of 1.0 mg L−1. After coronation of GO with BSA, a reduction in cadmium toxicity of 110 % and 238% was achieved when compared to bare GO and Cd2+-only, respectively. Integration of datasets associated with graphene-based materials, heavy metals and mixture toxicity is essential to enable re-use of the data and facilitate nanoinformatics approaches for design of safer nanomaterials for water quality monitoring and remediation technologies. Hence, all data from this work were annotated and integrated into the NanoCommons Knowledge Base, connecting the experimental data to nanoinformatics platforms under the FAIR data principles and making them interoperable with similar datasets.