Unraveling the effects of food-related engineered NANOparticles on the GUT interactive ecosystem (NanoGut)

The ever-growing exploitation of nanotechnologies and innovative nanomaterials in food and agricultural applications is rising a number of safety, environmental, ethical, policy and regulatory issues, becoming a priority field for scientific research. At present, packaging is the major foodrelated area of nanoparticles’ application (NPs, particles between 1 and 100 nanometers in size), increasing human oral exposure to estimated consumes of over a trillion man-made food-related NPs every day per person in developed countries. In addition, the growing awareness of the importance of the gut microbiome in health and disease, and the recognition that intestinal microflora exists as a biofilm with characteristics different from its planktonic counterpart, highlights the need to consider how deeply microbial and in particular bioflm-structures ecology can affect human health. However, a little number of published studies considered both the complexity of anaerobic intestinal biofilms and their interactions with food-related NPs and literature on the safety of oral exposure to food-related NPs and their effects on human-relevant biological systems provides insufficient reliable data. The NanoGut project funded by Fondazione Cariplo aims to elucidate the effects of sub-lethal concentrations of food-related NPs on the gut interactive ecosystem, potential toxicity mechanisms, and create the scientific know-how to develop leading edge methodologies vital for the nanosafety assessment. NanoGut involves the development of an interactive in vitro gut ecosystem model composed by: 1) Caco-2 intestinal epithelial cell; 2) anaerobic mono- and multi-species intestinal biofilm; 3) silver nanoparticles (AgNPs), chosen as the more representative engineered nanoparticles used in food packages and conservation, will be used as related-food NPs models; 4) a probiotic bacterium (Bacillus subtilis natto).