Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Experimental and Toxicologic Pathology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/etp A study of the correlation between ultrafine particle emissions in motorcycle smoke and mice erythrocyte damages Arinto Y.P. Wardoyo ⁎ , Unggul P. Juswono, Johan A.E. Noor Physics Department Brawijaya University, Jl. Veteran 65145, Malang, Indonesia ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Motorcycle Ultrafine particles Exposure Mice Erythrocytes ABSTRACT Sharply increasing of motor vehicles every year contributes to amounts of ultrafine particles (UFPs) in the air. Besides, the existence of UFPs in the blood may cause erythrocyte damages that subject to shape deformation. This study was aimed to investigate the influence of UFPs in the motorcycle smoke exposed to mice in different concentrations to the erythrocyte damages. The experiments were conducted by injecting the motorcycle smoke with the varied amounts in an experimental chamber (dimension of 30 × 20 × 20 cm 3 ) where the mice were put in advance for exposuring twice a day (100 s). Total numbers of UFPs in the smoke were calculated by measuring the total concentrations multiplied by the smoke debit. They were measured using a TSI 8525 P-Trak UPC. The effects of the smoke exposures in the mice’s erythrocytes related to the UFPs in the smoke were observed by a binocular CX-31 Computer Microscope after the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, and 10th exposure days. The erythrocyte damages were calculated from the total abnormal erythrocytes divided by the total erythrocytes. Our results showed that more UFPs exposed to mice resulted in more the erythrocytes damages. Longer exposures caused more damages of the mice erythrocytes. This study found significant correlations between the numbers of UFPs exposed to mice and the erythrocyte damages. Our finding gives important evidence that motorcycle emissions especially UFPs affect on health. 1. Introduction Motor vehicles have significantly increased in the recent year. In Indonesia only, a number of motor vehicles in 2013 reached 104,118,969, consisted of 11,484,514 passenger cars, 2,286,309 buses, 5,615,494 trucks, and 84,732,652 motorcycles (SI, 2014). In 2011, vehicles in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, was dominated by light gasoline vehicles, such as 92% of motorcycles, 3.46% of cars, 2.8% of light trucks, 0.1% of buses, and 1.1% of heavy truck diesel vehicles (Ho and Clappier, 2011). Road transport becomes a significant contributor causing an air quality problems in many cities (Pandey and Venkataraman, 2014). Several studies revealed that motor vehicles identified as the source of air pollutants (Chiang et al., 2014; Vanhulsel et al., 2014; Zhou et al., 2014). The pollutants are in gaseous and particulate matters (Kampa and Castanas, 2008). The gasesous emissions were reported about 94% CO, 68% NMVOC, 61% SO 2 , and 99% CH 4 (Ho and Clappier, 2011), meanwhile the particulate matters consisted of elementary carbon of 0.559% and organic carbon of 0.202% (Hu et al., 2015). In terms of particulate matters (PMs), a variation of concentration, composition, and size distribution were emitted from different vehicles (Morawska and Zhang, 2002). Particles with different particle size distribution have been measured, such as: ultrafine particles (UFPs), fine particles, and PM 10. Especially in UFPs, they have a diameter less than 0.1 μm (Madl and Pinkerton, 2009). The impacts of UFPs emitted by motor vehicles on human health have been investigated in previous studies due to their composition and toxicity characteristics (Sioutas et al., 2005; Weichenthal et al., 2014). In terms of their size, UFPs might be able to penetrate lung until the ends of alveoli, then following through blood stream (Oberdörster et al., 2005). They may deposite in the human respiratory tract and have impacts on cardiovascular health (Delfino et al., 2005). UFPs effects on experimental animals have been observed, and the results showed that UFPs caused damages into their organ, such as in pulmonary (Yamamoto et al., 2006), brain (Allen et al., 2014), heart (Jia et al., 2012), and erythrocyte cells (Nemmar and Inuwa, 2008). The effects of UFPs on erythrocytes has been studied in terms of erythrocyte sedi- mentation, induced hemmagglutination, and hemolysis, deformation, agglutination, and membrane damage (Li et al., 2008). Due to the very important role of erythrocytes in transporting oxygen to tissues or http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.etp.2017.06.003 Received 6 January 2017; Received in revised form 24 May 2017; Accepted 6 June 2017 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: a.wardoyo@ub.ac.id (A.Y.P. Wardoyo), unggul-pj@ub.ac.id (U.P. Juswono), jnoor@ub.ac.id (J.A.E. Noor). Abbreviations: UFP, ultrafine particles; PAHs, Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons; VOCs, Volatile Organic Compounds Experimental and Toxicologic Pathology xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0940-2993/ © 2017 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Wardoyo, A.Y.P., Experimental and Toxicologic Pathology (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.etp.2017.06.003