Ecotoxicology of Engineered Nanomaterials in Soil Systems

Engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) are increasingly incorporated into industrial processes, agriculture and consumer products, raising concerns about their release and fate in terrestrial environments. In soils, ENMs undergo transformations—aggregation, dissolution and surface passivation—that govern their bioavailability to plants, microbes and soil invertebrates. Key factors such as pH, organic matter content and cation exchange capacity modulate retention and mobilisation of metal‐based and metal‐oxide nanoparticles. Sentinel organisms, notably earthworms and enchytraeids, serve as indicators of sublethal impacts on survival, growth, reproduction and community structure. Recent work has revealed that molecular and cellular stress responses can be mapped via omics technologies, while population‐level effects have been observed over multiple generations. Adverse outcome pathways bridge mechanistic insights (for example, oxidative stress and membrane damage) to higher‐tier endpoints, supporting more predictive risk assessments. Emerging frameworks for sustainable design of ENMs advocate safe‐by‐design strategies that minimise ecotoxicological risk without compromising function. Integration of realistic exposure scenarios, standardised test protocols and mechanistic datasets is essential for regulatory decision‐making and the development of best practices to safeguard soil health on a global scale.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have demonstrated that multigenerational exposure of soil invertebrates to copper oxide nanomaterials elicits distinct and persistent effects compared with soluble copper salts. In continuous tests spanning seven generations of Enchytraeus crypticus, low‐level copper oxide nanomaterials induced reproductive impairment at concentrations that caused little effect in the first generation, while transfer to clean soil partly reversed some effects. By contrast, copper salts exhibited reduced toxicity over successive generations but regained potency upon return to spiked soil. These findings underscore the importance of long-term and transgenerational assessments for persistent nanomaterials and reveal that short-term assays may underestimate potential ecological risk.

Ecotoxicology of Engineered Nanomaterials in Soil Systems publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in ecotoxicology of engineered nanomaterials in soil systems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Engineered Nanomaterials (ENMs): Materials designed with at least one dimension between 1 and 100 nm, possessing unique physical and chemical properties.

Bioavailability: The fraction of a substance that is accessible to an organism for uptake in a given environmental medium.

Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC): A measure of a soil’s ability to retain and exchange positively charged ions, influencing retention of metal‐based nanoparticles.

Omics Technologies: High-throughput methods (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics) used to profile molecular responses to stressors.

Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP): A structured sequence of biological events linking a molecular initiating event to an adverse ecological or health outcome.

References

1. Multigenerational effects of copper nanomaterials (CuONMs) are different of those of CuCl2: exposure in the soil invertebrate Enchytraeus crypticus. Scientific Reports (2017).
2. Systems toxicology to advance human and environmental hazard assessment: A roadmap for advanced materials. Nano Today (2023).
3. Soil type dependent toxicity of AgNM300K can be predicted by internal concentrations in earthworms. Chemosphere (2024).
4. Recent Developments in the Application of Nanomaterials in Agroecosystems. Nanomaterials (2020).