NanoInformaTIX

NanoInformaTIX develops a web-based Sustainable Nanoinformatics Framework (SNF) platform for risk management of engineered nanomaterials (ENM) in industrial manufacturing. The tool will be based on the significant amounts of data on physico-chemical and toxicological and ecotoxicological properties of ENM generated over the last decades, as well as new data coming from research.

The final aim is to provide efficient user-friendly interfaces to enhance accessibility and usability of the nanoinformatics models to industry, regulators, and civil society, thus supporting sustainable manufacturing of ENM-based products.

In this project, our group developed of one of the first centralized mesocosm database management system for environmental nanosafety (called MESOCOSM) containing experimental data collected from mesocosm experiments suited for understanding and quantifying both the environmental hazard and exposure. The database, which is publicly available, contains more than 7000 entities covering tens of unique experiments investigating Ag, CeO2, CuO, TiO2-based ENMs as well as nano-enabled products. These entities are divided into different groups i.e. physicochemical properties of nanomaterials, environmental, exposure and hazard endpoints, and other general information about the mesocosm testing, resulting in more than forty parameters in the database. MESOCOSM is expected to benefit the nanosafety community by providing a continuous source of critical information and additional characterization factors for predicting ENMs interactions with the environment and their risks.