As some Sciencebase visitors will know, I was on the editorial team that published Sir Harry Kroto’s original paper on fullerenes many moons ago. Now, I see there’s something of a reason not to be cheerful regarding this discovery, at least according to research published by the ACS.
In a challenge to conventional wisdom, scientists have found that buckyballs dissolve in water and could have a negative impact on soil bacteria. The findings raise new questions about how the nanoparticles might behave in the environment and how they should be regulated, according to a report scheduled to appear in the June 1 issue of Environmental Science & Technology.
Recent studies showed that even low concentrations of fullerenes could affect biological systems such as human skin cells, but this latest study is among the earliest to assess how buckyballs might behave when they come in contact with water in nature.
Fullerenes have until been thought of as insoluble in water, which suggests they pose no imminent threat to most natural systems. “We haven’t really thought of water as a vector for the movement of these types of materials,” says Joseph Hughes of Georgia Tech and lead author of the study.
But, Hughes and his collaborators at Rice University in Texas have found that buckyballs combine into unusual nano-sized clumps – which they refer to as “nano-C60” – that are about 10 orders of magnitude more soluble in water than the individual carbon molecules.
In this new experiment, they exposed nano-C60 to two types of common soil bacteria and found that the particles inhibited both the growth and respiration of the bacteria at very low concentrations – as little as 0.5 parts per million. “What we have found is that these C60 aggregates are pretty good antibacterial materials,” Hughes says. “It may be possible to harness that for tremendously good applications, but it could also have impacts on ecosystem health.”
It will be interesting to see how the media takes to these findings, especially given that buckyballs are nanoscale objects. No doubt it will be just one more objection from the chemophobes to the development of new chemical technologies.