Toxicogenomic responses of human alveolar epithelial cells to tungsten boride nanoparticles

During the recent years, microarray analysis of gene expression has become an inevitable tool for exploring toxicity of drugs and other chemicals on biological systems. Therefore, toxicogenomics is considered as a fruitful area for searching cellular pathways and mechanisms including cancer, immunological diseases, environmental responses, gene-gene interactions and chemical toxicity. In this work, we examined toxic effects of Tungsten Borides NPs on gene expression profiling of the human lung alveolar epithelial cells (HPAEpiC). In line with this purpose, a single crystal of tungsten boride (mixture of WB and W₂B) nanoparticles was synthesized by means of zone melting method, and characterized via using X-ray crystallography (XRD), transmission electron microscope (TEM), scanning electron microscope (SEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) techniques. Cell viability and cytotoxicity were determined by 3-(4,5-dimethyl-thiazol-2-yl) 2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT), neutral red (NR) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) release tests. The whole genome microarray expression analysis was performed to find out the effects of WB and W₂B NPs mixture on gene expression of the HPAEpiC cell culture. 123 of 40,000 gene probes were assigned to characterize expression profile for WB/W2B NPs exposure. According to results; 70 genes were up-regulated and 53 genes were down-regulated (≥2 fold change). For further investigations, these genes were functionally classified by using DAVID (The Database for Annotation, Visualization and Integrated Discovery) with gene ontology (GO) analysis. In the light of the data gained from this study, it could be concluded that the mixture of WB/W2B NPs can affect cytokine/chemokine metabolism, angiogenesis and prevent migration/invasion by activating various genes.