Although many toxicological investigations on nanoparticles have
been carried out using different cell lines and living organisms, their
potential harmful effect is still unclear and sometimes even contradictory
by the lack of standardised toxicological procedures for
nanomaterials. Nanoparticles are naturally or intentionally be present
in the environment and afterwards entered in living organisms
through direct routes. In biological systems, the unexpected
toxicity of nanomaterials related to the cellular uptake,
biodistribution, possible transformations over time or with
biomolecules is influenced by a variety of factors such as the
nanoparticle nature and size, surface-to-volume ratio, colloidal stability
and surface reactivity . Taking into account that some
of these nanomaterials are considered as human life threatening,
emerging analytical methodologies are recently reported to provide
innovative detection strategies towards nanoparticles in a wide
variety of scenarios (simple and complex matrices).