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The Drive Towards Rational Understanding Tire Wear Particle Toxicity: Integrating Experiment with In Theoretical Research
Summary
Every time your car's tires hit the road, they shed tiny plastic particles that build up in soil, water, and air — and this review takes stock of how scientists currently test whether those particles are toxic to living things. The paper doesn't reveal new health harms itself, but points out that current testing methods fall short of capturing real-world exposure, and calls for combining lab experiments with AI-powered predictions to get more reliable answers. This matters because tire particles are one of the biggest sources of microplastic pollution, and understanding their true risk is a necessary step before we can know how much they might affect human health.
As one of the main human sources of global microplastics, tire wear particles (TWPs) are increasingly recognized for their environmental accumulation and ecological risks. Traditional toxicity assessment methods have limitations in the complex mixture effect of capturing TWPs, the aging transformation process and chronic sublethal toxicity. In this review, we systematically summarizes the experimental research methods of TWPs toxicity evaluation, covering various model organisms, exposure scenario design and acute/chronic/molecular endpoints, as well as computational toxicology tools such as QSAR, q-RASAR, AI and systemic toxicology.Our analysis highlights the current challenges in data standardization, environmental authenticity simulation and model interpretability. Future research should develop a "dry and wet closed-loop" framework. The framework must integrate multi-group and high-throughfot experiments. It should also contain explainable artificial intelligence. These integrations will improve the accuracy and efficiency of the ecological risk assessment of tire wear particles.