Toxicity of combustion condensates on human cells

Abstract

Combustion exhausts emitted from traffic and industry sources represent the main contributors to air pollution in urban areas, and as such they have been associated with increased mortality and cardiorespiratory morbidity. Despite intense research, the mechanism of these correlations is still not fully understood. Most of the studies published so far have focused their research on only soot particles or their surrogates (e.g. carbon black), thereby neglecting other combustion by-products present in exhausts. The “cool trap” method, applied in this work, collects particulate and gaseous components of the combustion exhaust. Utilisation of such heterogeneous mixtures can give a better insight in the toxicity of combustion exhausts. The main aim of this work was to study the toxicity of combustion condensates on human alveolar (A-549) and human monocyte-like (U-937) cell lines. The combustion condensates originated from premixed ethylene/oxygen laboratory flames or from diesel fuel combustion. Pre-screening of toxicity was performed by using bacterial SWITCH test which utilises the recombinant S. typhimurium TA1535 pSWITCH strain.