| 英文摘要: | Sci. Total Environ. http://doi.org/bvjp (2016) Up to 10,000 t of titanium dioxide nanoparticles (nTiO2) — used in sunscreens, paints, plastics and cement, among other applications — are produced each year; a proportion of this is subsequently released into the environment. CO2 can modify the behaviour of nanomaterials such as nTiO2, so increasing the atmospheric CO2 concentration may alter their environmental burden in the future when they are expected to be increasingly abundant in the environment. Wenchao Du from Nanjing University, China, and co-authors investigate the effect of elevated atmospheric CO2 on the toxicity of nTiO2 to plants and soil microbes in a rice paddy experiment. They find that nTiO2 does not affect rice plants at ambient CO2 levels. However, under elevated CO2 concentration nTiO2 significantly reduces rice biomass (by 17.9%). In addition, elevated CO2 enhances the accumulation of a number of heavy metals and reduced fat and total sugar in rice grains. These findings indicate that increasing atmospheric CO2 may increase the toxicity of some nanoparticle contaminants, potentially reducing the nutritional quality of some crops. |