Evidence that nano-TiO<sub>2</sub> induces acute cytotoxicity to the agronomically beneficial nitrogen-fixing bacteria <i>Sinorhizobium meliloti</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When nano-sized titanium dioxide (nano-TiO 2 ) absorbs ultra-violet (UV-A) radiation, it produces reactive oxygen species that can be toxic to bacteria. We used the agronomically beneficial nitrogen-fixing bacterium Sinorhizobium meliloti strain 1021 as a model microorganism to detect nano-TiO 2 toxicity. Sinorhizobium meliloti was exposed to aqueous dispersions of micrometer-sized TiO 2 (micron-TiO 2 , 44 μm) or nanometer-sized TiO 2 (nano-TiO 2 , 21 nm) at nominal concentrations of 0, 100, 300, 600, 900, and 1800 mg TiO 2 /L. There were fewer viable S. meliloti cells after exposure to nano-TiO 2 under dark and UV-A light conditions. Nano-TiO 2 was more toxic to S. meliloti with UV-A irradiation (100% mortality at 100 mg TiO 2 /L) than under dark conditions (100% mortality at 900 mg TiO 2 /L). Micron-TiO 2 concentrations less than 300 mg TiO 2 /L had no effect on S. meliloti viability under dark or UV-A light conditions. Exposure to 600 mg/L or more of micron-TiO 2 under UV-A light could also photo-kill S. meliloti cells (100% mortality). Further studies are needed to ascertain whether nano-TiO 2 interferes with the growth of N 2 -fixing microorganisms in realistic agricultural environments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".