Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) have provided the first evidence that engineered nanoparticles are able to accumulate within plants and damage their DNA.
Photo credit: H. Wang, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
While the nanoparticle concentrations used in this study were higher than those likely to be encountered by plants under a typical soil exposure scenario, the researchers showed that cupric oxide nanoparticles had a significant effect on growth, stunting the development of both roots and shoots in all three plant species tested.
