Assessing possible influence of structuring effects in solution on cytotoxicity of ionic liquid systems

During the last decades, micro-structuring phenomena, formation of polar domains and assembling of nano-scale heterogeneities in ionic liquids (ILs) have been discovered. Here we assess the influence of structuring effects in solution on biological activity of ionic systems. In the present work, we studied cytotoxicity of aqueous solutions of binary mixtures of common ILs and showed that it mostly did not comply with the concentration addition model thus suggesting the occurrence of toxicity-affecting interactions in the media. In most cases, antagonistic effects were observed in the studied systems. Micro-heterogeneous water structures were experimentally detected in the binary IL mixtures for the first time. By using a cytotoxicity assay, NMR spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy, a novel research direction was explored dealing with a relationship between dynamic structuring effects in ILs and their cytotoxicity.