ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE ELUCIDATION THE TOXICITY MECHANISM OF METAL OXIDE AND CARBON-BASED NANOPARTICLES WITH P53 PROTEIN USING MOLECULAR DOCKING APPROACH 1, *Krishna Pal Singh, 2 Neeraj Verma and 1,* Qamar Rahman 1 Amity Institute of Biotechnology, Amity University, Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow, India 2 Society for Biological Research and Rural Development, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Metal oxide and carbon-based nanoparticles (NP) have a wide range of application in various fields, including paint, electroluminescent, pharmaceutical, and other industries. In the last decade, there is an exceeding demand of the applications using these particles in biomedical sciences such as in drug delivery system whereas these materials are also used widely in the environmental applications. Due to their extensive applications, these materials are the class of highest global annual production. The information of the potentially harmful effect of these nanoparticles lags behind their increased use in consumer products and therefore, the safety data on various nanoparticles applicable for risk assessment is urgently needed. The availability of less information of toxicity and harmful effects on the human biological system of these particles, there is a need to understand the toxicity of metal oxides and carbon-based nanoparticles. In the present study, we elucidate the toxic impact of the metal oxide and carbon-based nanoparticles on p53 DNA binding domain protein using molecular docking approach. Furthermore, we also explore the binding phenomenon between the p53 protein and nanoparticles (metal oxide and carbon-based NP) using the same molecular docking approach. The study illustrates that metal oxide based nanomaterial has a high binding affinity toward the DNA binding domain of p53 protein as compared to carbon-based nanoparticles, this happens because the metal oxide nanoparticles formed hydrogen and metal acceptor bonds whereas in the case of carbon-based nanoparticles only van der Waal interactions were identified in the molecular interaction. Due to the binding of these nanoparticles, DNA is unable to interact with binding domain site which may lead to deactivation of the tumor suppressing nature of the p53 protein. *Corresponding author: Copyright©2017, Krishna Pal Singh et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. INTRODUCTION In recent times, development in nanotechnology engineering has increased the prompt expansion of many applications for nanoparticles such as metal nanoparticles (gold, silver etc.), metal oxide nanoparticles (TiO 2, CuO, ZnO, fullerene etc.), C 60 fullerenes nanocrystals, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in various industries (Nel et al., 2006; Buzea et al., 2007; De Stefano et al., 2012; Oberdörster 2012). Principally, nanoparticles and nanofibers, depict advanced physical and chemical properties per unit weight, and these activities explain their vast application not only in industry but also in the scientific and medical researchers (Jain et al., 2015). Nanoparticles are unique with their dimensional and structural properties and extensively been used in various nanomedicine- related applications, which include cancer targeting, visualization, and destruction visualization in different biological systems (Suri et al., 2007; Cai et al., 2008). The application of nanoparticles as a biomaterial necessitates fully dissimilar assessments of safety, which include in-silico and in-vivo analysis, implantation tests, cytotoxicity tests and carcinogenicity tests, due to the research in last two decades has highlighted the toxicity and potential risks of their use for various applications (Hoet et al., 2004; Gangwal et al., 2011; ISSN: 2230-9926 International Journal of Development Research Vol. 07, Issue, 08, pp.14449-14454, August, 2017 Article History: Received 19 th May, 2017 Received in revised form 17 th June, 2017 Accepted 10 th July, 2017 Published online 30 th August, 2017 Available online at http://www.journalijdr.com Citation: Krishna Pal Singh, Neeraj Verma and Qamar Rahman, 2017. “Elucidation the toxicity mechanism of metal oxide and carbon-based Nanoparticles with p53 protein using molecular docking approach”, International Journal of Development Research, 7, (08), 14449-14454. ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access Keywords: p53 protein, Metal oxide nanoparticles (TiO2, ZnO, and CuO), Carbon based nanoparticles (Fullerene and SWCNT), Molecular docking.