CEINT Student Wins Best Overall Poster at ICEENN

Daniel Starnes presented “Silver Nanoparticles get better with age” at the 9th annual International Conference on the Environmental Effects of Nanoparticles and Nanomaterials in Columbia, SC. His poster was selected as the overall best poster at the conference. Daniel’s poster presented transcriptomic profiling of pristine and sulfidized silver nanoparticles as well as ionic silver in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Silver nanoparticles are used in a wide variety of consumer and medical products as a biocide. They are rapidly transformed to silver sulfide during wastewater treatment processes which is the form which is most relevant to many environmental exposures. The importance of the genes that were identified as being differentially expressed was tested using mutant strains and RNA interference. His results, combined with previous results, indicate that ionic silver, pristine silver nanoparticles and sulfidized silver nanoparticles elicit toxicity through distinct mechanisms. This is important because much of the ecotoxicology literature concerning silver nanoparticles is based on exposures to pristine silver nanoparticles rather than sulfidized forms. Dan’s research will help to pave the way towards more scientifically sound ecological risk assessments for silver nanomaterials. His research is funded by the U.S. EPA Science to Achieve Results Program through the joint United States-United Kingdom research consortium, “The Transatlantic Initiative for Nanotechnology in the Environment”. This project involves a number of CEINT researchers and partners in the United Kingdom.