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Toxics
Special Issues
Atmospheric Aerosols and Human Health
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Atmospheric Aerosols and Human Health

A Special Issue of Toxics (ISSN 2305-6304) belonging to the section "Air Pollution and Health".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 January 2027 | Viewed by 2178

Editor

Dr. Choong-Min Kang

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Environmental Health Department, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, MA 2115, USA
Interests: air pollution chemistry; atmospheric analysis; air pollution exposure; radioactivity analysis; source apportionment; environmental health
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Atmospheric aerosols—suspensions of solid and liquid particles in air—play central roles in climate, air quality, and human and ecosystem health. They originate from natural sources (sea spray, dust, wildfires, biogenic emissions, volcanic activity) and human activities (fossil fuel and biomass combustion, industry, agriculture, transportation). Their impacts are governed by size, composition, mixing state, and lifetime, which control interactions with radiation, clouds, trace gases, and surfaces.

Aerosols scatter and absorb solar and terrestrial radiation, exerting both cooling and warming effects, and act as cloud condensation and ice-nucleating particles, altering cloud properties, precipitation, and atmospheric circulation. They drive regional phenomena such as haze, visibility degradation, and the deposition of nutrients and contaminants on land, in the ocean, and in the cryosphere, thereby influencing biogeochemical cycles. Rapid changes in emissions, land use, and climate are reshaping global and regional aerosol burdens and distributions.

This Special Issue invites contributions that advance our understanding of aerosol sources, transformations, and sinks; radioactive interactions; and the coupled climate–air quality–health implications necessary to inform effective, equitable policy and mitigation.

We invite the following submission types:

  • Original research articles;
  • Review and perspective papers on emerging or cross-cutting topics.

Dr. Choong-Min Kang
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Toxics is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • atmospheric aerosols
  • source apportionment
  • radioactivity
  • health effect
  • mitigation

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

29 pages, 5236 KB  
Article
An A549 Cell-Based Approach Using Repeated Fluorescence Readouts for Assessing Reactive Oxygen Species Activity of Atmospheric Particulate Matter
by Ioanna Tzagkaroulaki, Evangelia Diapouli, Vasiliki Vasilatou, Stefanos Papagiannis and Efthimios Tagaris
Toxics 2026, 14(9), 789; https://doi.org/10.3390/toxics14090789 - 7 Sep 2026
Abstract
Exposure to atmospheric particulate matter (PM) is a major public-health concern, in part because PM can perturb cellular redox homeostasis. This study evaluates an in vitro A549/DCFH-DA approach using repeated fluorescence readouts to assess PM2.5-induced oxidative activity. Untreated and assay-specific controls were combined [...] Read more.
Exposure to atmospheric particulate matter (PM) is a major public-health concern, in part because PM can perturb cellular redox homeostasis. This study evaluates an in vitro A549/DCFH-DA approach using repeated fluorescence readouts to assess PM2.5-induced oxidative activity. Untreated and assay-specific controls were combined with zymosan and NIST Standard Reference Material® 2584 suspended in PBS, and fluorescence was monitored at multiple readout times over a 15 min–6 h window. Method performance was characterized using the coefficient of variation (CV) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). A dedicated three-concentration SRM 2584 series (0.02, 0.05 and 0.10 mg mL−1) further showed readout-dependent concentration behaviour: at 60 min the untreated-control-corrected mean response increased across the tested concentrations and followed an approximate descriptive linear trend (R2 = 0.90), whereas earlier readouts were non-monotonic. Substrate-related effects were examined using paired PTFE and quartz filters. Among the eight matched PTFE–quartz pairs included in the regression analysis, zero-intercept fits showed slopes close to unity for both mass- and air-volume-normalized responses (0.90 and 0.99, respectively; R2 ≈ 0.99), demonstrating strong proportional agreement within this comparison set; the limited number of pairs does not support universal substrate interchangeability. Application to chemically characterized field PM2.5 samples from an urban-background site and a high-altitude site showed that DCFH-DA fluorescence did not track PM mass alone and is interpreted in terms of exploratory associations with particle composition, rather than causal effects of individual constituents. Taken together, these findings support the use of the method-performance-characterized workflow for assessing oxidative responses to field-collected PM2.5 across multiple readout times and for investigating their associations with particle chemical characteristics. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Atmospheric Aerosols and Human Health)
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21 pages, 5561 KB  
Article
Long-Term Ambient PM2.5 Exposure and Premature Mortality Across of Türkiye
by Nebile Özmen, Volkan Duran, Fatma Şencan, Yasin Paşa and Mehmet Ali Çelik
Toxics 2026, 14(8), 728; https://doi.org/10.3390/toxics14080728 - 17 Aug 2026
Viewed by 687
Abstract
Long-term exposure to ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is the leading environmental risk factor for premature mortality worldwide, yet comprehensive province-level evidence quantifying its health burden across Türkiye remains limited. This study investigated the spatial relationship between long-term PM2.5 exposure [...] Read more.
Long-term exposure to ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is the leading environmental risk factor for premature mortality worldwide, yet comprehensive province-level evidence quantifying its health burden across Türkiye remains limited. This study investigated the spatial relationship between long-term PM2.5 exposure and all-cause attributable mortality across all 81 Turkish provinces in 2022 using province-level annual mean PM2.5 concentrations and World Health Organisation (WHO) AirQ+ estimates of PM2.5-attributable deaths among adults aged ≥30 years, assuming a counterfactual concentration of 5 µg/m3. The association between PM2.5 exposure and mortality was evaluated using Pearson and Spearman correlation analyses, ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, a log–log elasticity model, and population-weighted regional and exposure-quartile comparisons, while national temporal indicators for 2010–2023 were reported solely as supplementary context for the primary single-year 2022 cross-sectional analysis. The population-weighted annual mean PM2.5 concentration was 27.0 µg/m3, exceeding the WHO Air Quality Guideline by a factor of 5.4, and all 81 provinces exceeded the recommended threshold. The bivariate OLS model accounted for 41% of the between-province variation in attributable mortality rates (OLS slope = 3.23 additional deaths per 100,000 population for each 1 µg/m3 increase in PM2.5; 95% CI: 2.37–4.10; R2 = 0.41; p < 0.001), while the log–log elasticity model indicated that a 1% increase in PM2.5 concentration was associated with a 0.80% increase in the attributable mortality rate (95% CI: 0.65–0.95). The attributable fraction of natural-cause mortality increased progressively from 8.8% in the lowest exposure quartile to 24.6% in the highest. Nationwide, an estimated 68,440 premature deaths, representing 14.2% of all natural-cause deaths among adults aged ≥30 years, were attributable to PM2.5 exposure. These findings quantify a steep, spatially graded PM2.5-attributable mortality burden across Türkiye. As the attributable estimates derive from the WHO AirQ+ concentration–response function, the gradient describes the magnitude and spatial distribution of the modelled burden rather than an independently estimated exposure–response relationship, and on that basis the results support the adoption of WHO-aligned air-quality standards and accelerated decarbonization strategies to reduce the national health burden attributable to ambient air pollution. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Atmospheric Aerosols and Human Health)
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17 pages, 1923 KB  
Article
Source-Specific Oxidative Potential of PM2.5 in Xi’an: Roles of Water-Soluble Metals Revealed by DTT Assay and Interpretable Machine Learning
by Lei Chen, Na Wang, Qian Zhang, Xinghua Zhang, Zhihua Li and Weidong Jing
Toxics 2026, 14(8), 646; https://doi.org/10.3390/toxics14080646 - 23 Jul 2026
Viewed by 911
Abstract
Oxidative stress is a central mechanism underlying the toxicity of fine particulate matter (PM2.5); however, the source-specific chemical drivers of particle-associated oxidative potential remain incompletely understood. In this study, the oxidative potential (OP) of ambient PM2.5 in Xi’an was investigated [...] Read more.
Oxidative stress is a central mechanism underlying the toxicity of fine particulate matter (PM2.5); however, the source-specific chemical drivers of particle-associated oxidative potential remain incompletely understood. In this study, the oxidative potential (OP) of ambient PM2.5 in Xi’an was investigated during winter and summer using the dithiothreitol (DTT) assay, with particular emphasis on the toxicological roles of water-soluble metals and emission sources. PM2.5 exhibited significantly higher volume-normalized OP (DTTv) in winter, indicating an enhanced particle-associated oxidative stress burden during the heating period. Notably, although water-soluble metals accounted for only a minor fraction of PM2.5 mass, interpretable machine learning analysis (XGBoost–SHAP) identified potassium and manganese as dominant contributors to OP, highlighting the importance of biomass burning tracers and redox-active transition metals in particle-mediated reactive oxygen species generation. Source apportionment further revealed pronounced seasonal contrasts: dust sources contributed substantially to wintertime OP primarily due to their large mass loading, whereas traffic-related emissions dominated OP in summer owing to their high intrinsic oxidative toxicity. Overall, these findings suggest that variations in PM2.5 oxidative potential are more closely associated with chemical composition and source-specific oxidative activity than with particle mass alone, providing additional insight into the factors influencing PM-related health risks. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Atmospheric Aerosols and Human Health)
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