Oxidative potential of particulate matter 2.5 as predictive indicator of cellular stress

Particulate air pollution being recognized to be responsible for short and long term health effects, regulations for particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter less than 2.5 (PM_2.5) are more and more restrictive. PM_2.5 regulation is based on mass without taking into account PM_2.5 composition that drives toxicity. Measurement of the oxidative potential (OP) of PM could be an additional PM indicator that would encompass the PM components involved in oxidative stress, the main mechanism of PM toxicity. We compared different methods to evaluate the intrinsic oxidative potential of PM_2.5 sampled in Paris and their ability to reflect the oxidative and inflammatory response in bronchial epithelial cells used as relevant target organ cells. The dithiothreitol depletion assay, the antioxidant (ascorbic acid and glutathione) depletion assay (OP^AO), the plasmid scission assay and the dichlorofluorescein (DCFH) oxidation assay used to characterize the OP of PM_2.5 (10-100 μg/mL) provided positive results of different magnitude with all the PM_2.5 samples used with significant correlation with different metals such as Cu and Zn as well as total polyaromatic hydrocarbons and the soluble organic fraction. The OP^AO assay showed the best correlation with the production of intracellular reactive oxygen species by NCI-H292 cell line assessed by DCFH oxidation and with the expression of anti-oxidant genes (superoxide dismutase 2, heme-oxygenase-1) as well as the proinflammatory response (Interleukin 6) when exposed from 1 to 10 μg/cm². The OP^AO assay appears as the most prone to predict the biological effect driven by PM_2.5 and related to oxidative stress.