The DaNa2.0 Knowledge Base Nanomaterials-An Important Measure Accompanying Nanomaterials Development

Abstract

Nanotechnology is closely related to the tailored manufacturing of nanomaterials for a huge variety of applications. However, such applications with newly developed materials are also a reason for concern. The DaNa^2.0 project provides information and support for these issues on the web in condensed and easy-to-understand wording. Thus, a key challenge in the field of advanced materials safety research is access to correct and reliable studies and validated results. For nanomaterials, there is currently a continuously increasing amount of publications on toxicological issues, but criteria to evaluate the quality of these studies are necessary to use them e.g., for regulatory purposes. DaNa^2.0 discusses scientific results regarding 26 nanomaterials based on actual literature that has been selected after careful evaluation following a literature criteria checklist. This checklist is publicly available, along with a selection of standardized operating protocols (SOPs) established by different projects. The spectrum of information is rounded off by further articles concerning basics or crosscutting topics in nanosafety research. This article is intended to give an overview on DaNa^2.0 activities to support reliable toxicity testing and science communication alike.

Keywords: basic information; literature criteria checklist; nanomaterials; nanotoxicology; safety.

Figure 1

DaNa^2.0 Website Access Statistics 2016 generated using Webanalytic Tools PIWIK [35] and Google Analytics [36], showing access-data for the most popular six materials. (A) Total access of all ENM; access-data sorted by website language in: (B) English and (C) German. (D) shows an overview of the three most accessed nanomaterials 2016 in correlation with the respective visitor countries.

Figure 2

Website Access Statistics 2016 generated using the same tools as for Figure 1, showing the development of visitor numbers & page views from 2014 to 2016 (top); ranking of visitor numbers in 2016 sorted by country and continent of origin.