What is toxicity of beads in relation to cells and cell culture?
The concern about toxicity here is that the cells can take the particles in via either phagocytosis or endocytosis (two separate cellular mechanisms for taking in particles of various sorts). Once taken in things go into endosomes and these initial membrane bounded vesicles fuse with a lysosome forming a phagolysosome. In these vesicles things get digested by various enzymes. My guess is that particles would pretty much persist because the polymer bonds are not attacked by the sort of hydrolytic enzymes found in mammalian cells. Whether this would be toxic is hard to predict. There was a study about 12 years back by a group at IU Med center on toxicity of cross linked PS particles in rabbits. This work was about drug delivery studies. There was no toxicity demonstrated.
