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The tremendous increase of the use of nanomaterials (NMs) has been witnessed during the last decade in many areas of human life including the chemical industry, cosmetics, biomedicine or food technology. The variety of NMs, their unique properties, almost ubiquitous presence and the size range of 1-100 nm raised the interest of toxicologists. The evaluation of the frequency of micronuclei (MN) as a result of the genotoxic events is a broadly utilized and well-established approach in in vitro studies for testing the risk of chemical exposure. Nevertheless, properties of the NMs give rise to the questions concerning the optimal methodological variants of the MN assay.In our study, five types of well-characterized NMs (TiO2: NM-101 and NM-103; SiO2: NM-200; Ag: NM-300K and NM-302) of specific size, shape, or e.g. dimensions of aggregates were involved in the genotoxicity testing using four variants of protocols differing in the time of NM exposure, application of cytochalasin-B combined with simultaneous and delayed co-treatment with nanoparticles (NPs). Bronchial epithelial cells (BEAS-2B) were used in this study to fulfil these tasks. Presence of NPs was controlled by transmission electron microscopy (TEM).Obtained results showed the different genotoxic potential of the various TiO2 and Ag NMs (NM-101<NM-103 and NM-300K>NM-302, respectively). Comparison of all testing strategies revealed, that the level of DNA damage can differ based on the time of exposure and the methodological approach. In general, using cytochalasin-B led most frequently to the increase of the genotoxic potential of the tested NMs.
Keywords: BEAS-2B cells, genotoxicity, micronucleus assay, nanomaterials© 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.