from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Nowadays nanomaterials are widely used in industry, medicine, cosmetics, remediation of persistent pollutants, and therefore it is important to test their possible harmful effects on both human health and environment. However, nanoparticles can be often contaminated by bacterial endotoxins (lipopolysaccharides, pyrogens) that can cause false positive results of the (eco)toxicological tests. For this reason, nanoparticle samples should always be screened for endotoxin presence before performing any toxicological studies. Some types of nanoparticles interfere with traditional methods determining the level of endotoxin contamination. The aim of this study was to evaluate two different methods for endotoxin detection and to compare their performance. The first commonly used method, chromogenic LAL assay, is fast, and relatively cheap, but it is known that the test is susceptible to inconclusive results due to nanomaterial interactions. The second one, EndoLISA, is a new, ELISA-based assay in which nanoparticle interference is minimized due to specific binding of endotoxin onto a surface. Our results demonstrate that EndoLISA assay can be less sensitive than chromogenic LAL assay in low endotoxin concentrations, but can be used at higher endotoxin levels in which LAL test cannot be applied.
Keywords: Chromogenic LAL assay, EndoLISA, endotoxin; LPS, nanoparticles© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.