Interaction between carbon nanotubes and 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 cell cycle dysregulation occurred, evaluated by fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS) analysis. However, significances were assessed for cell proliferation and viability for semiconducting CNTs by the paired t-test. It is also clear that CNTs showed adherence to cell, since efficiency of cell ablation by trypsin decreased dramatically in CNTs dishes; this phenomenon was observed especially in semiconducting CNTs. Since semiconducting CNTs do not include armchair CNTs while metallic CNTs do, it indicates that armchair CNTs have high possibility of affection toward biocompatibility. It is expected that armchair CNTs change the behavior of cells such as proliferation and viability.