Speaker: Sijie Lin
Title: Understanding the Environmental Implication of Nanomaterials – Where do High Throughput Screening and Big Date Research Fit In?
Abstract: The expansion of nanotechnology has greatly enriched human lives by providing innovative nanomaterials and products. It is, however, inevitably to consider the possible environmental health and safety implication as the novel physicochemical properties of nanomaterials could also generate unwanted hazardous biological outcomes. Considering the ever-increasing varieties of nanomaterials, it is not intuitively favorable to conduct hazard assessment of nanomaterial one at a time. Instead, studying groups of nanomaterials with well-characterized properties would allow the establishment of correlation between their physicochemical properties and hazard potential, i.e. structure-activity relationship (SAR). In order to foster such study, high throughput screening (HTS) and big data analytical approaches play a pivotal role. This talk will focus on the use of zebrafish, an in vivo model with environmental and human health relevance, to study the hazard potential of nanomaterials. Examples of how HTS and big data analytics approaches can be applied to this model and contribute to the understanding of metal oxide nanomaterials SAR will be presented. Such strategy could also be leveraged to develop nanomaterials for safer applications, including bio-imaging, diagnostic, drug delivery, environmental remediation, etc.