Evaluating Metabolic Responses in Mice to Nanosized Titanium Dioxide Particles Using Gas ChromatographyMass Spectrometry Based Metabolomics

Titanium dioxide nanoparticle (TiO2 NP) is one of the most commonly used engineered nanoparticles. It has attracted lot of interest to analytical toxicologists in recent past due to its toxicity on human health and environment. The present study was aimed to explore the GC-MS based metabolomics as a tool to investigate the toxicity of TiO2 NP in comparison to TiO2 BP with doses of 300, 600, 1200 mg/kg respectively in both gender(s) of Swiss Albino mice for 7 and 14 days. Serum biochemistry and histopathology parameters were performed. Chemometric analysis by supervised PLS-DA was performed to identify the discrimination/classification between exposed and non-exposed samples due to metabolic perturbations. The morphological, biochemical, haematological and metabolomic analysis revealed that, TiO2 NP has induced toxicological effects to both female and male mice. The results showed that metabolomics along with biochemical analysis can be employed as a comprehensive tool to identify the toxicity of NPs in the model organisms at molecular level.