Biochemical and Physiological Toxicity of Nanoparticles in Plant

As increasing application of nanoparticles, nanoparticles have been becoming a new emerging environmental pollution that attracts a lot of attention from the scientific community and also regulatory agents. In the past decade, studying the toxicity and environmental impacts of nanoparticles is becoming a hot research field and more and more researches have been published using both plant and animal system. In this chapter, using oxidized metal nanoparticles as an example, we introduce a detailed protocol for performing research on biochemical and physiological toxicity of nanoparticles in plant. We employ a hydroponics system to study phytotoxicity of nanoparticles, which makes it easier to study the impact of nanoparticles. In this chapter, we majorly focus on plant respiration and photosynthesis, root vigor as well as oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is one major physiological response to different environmental pollution, in which we present a detailed method for detecting free radical oxygen species as well as the major molecules and enzymes associating with oxidative stress, including SOD and POD. Although we introduce the methods using cotton as an example, the protocols presented in this chapter can be used almost any plant species to test the biochemical and physiological toxicity of an environmental pollution.