Pitfalls in cytotoxicity studies could be tripping up chemists

Cytotoxic analyses of green chemicals are yielding inconsistent – and potentially misleading – conclusions about the safety of such chemicals, new research suggests. ‘What surprised us almost immediately was that, for the exact same [sample], wildly different toxicity values were reported in the literature,’ says Valentine Ananikov, at the Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry in Russia. By identifying potential pitfalls in current testing methods, Ananikov and his team have put together suggestions on how chemists can generate more reliable and reproducible data.