Most of artificial nanoparticles gets into the cell interior in endosomes. If they can’t be digested by the cell, they stay inside late endosome / lysosom vesicle. How long they can stay inside the cell? Do they form “residual body”. Are they accumulated in Golgi apparatus? Is cell able to excrete them outside? Under which conditions? We are able to observe such fluorescent late endosomes inside the cell even couple of days after digestion.
we can try to extrapolate from macromolecules, e.g. protein. When alpha-2-µ-globulin becomes "indigestable", e.g. by limonene, it will stay in the lysosomes long enough to mimick (or really be) a lysosomal storage disease, cells full of hyaline droplets eventually resulting in cell death. Of course, as their special physiological function these tubulus epithelial cells may take up alpha-2-µ-globulin in huge quantities. But in principle, a lysosomal storage disease (or something similar) induced by un-degradable nanoparticles is conceivable.
The question arises whether nanoparticles that are derived from plastic waste degradation (e.g. UV, acid) represent a serious threat to micro-organisms. If so, we could be in real trouble - in the last 10 years more plastic has been produced than during the complete past century.
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