In order to study the mechanisms of the toxicity of quartz particles on the intraperi-toneal monocyte, the chemical composition of the cells which were treated with two sorts of quartz particles with different surface were determined. That is, the amount of amino acid, total nitrogen, acid-soluble nucleotide, nucleic acid and the number of cells were measured on the monocytes with LI2M (quartz treated with alkaline after 2 minutes grind-ing) or QI-1001I (quartz ground for 100 hours) and withoutquartz particles. The amounts of these substances in monocytes with QI-100H were almost equal to those in monocytes without quartz particles. In the monocytes with LI2M the change of the amounts of amino acid, total nitrogen and nucleic acids corresponded with the change of the number of cells, whereas the amount of acid-soluble nucleotide decreased very rapidly and remarkably. The amount of acid-soluble nucleotide decreased with increasing dust doses and the linear relationship was observed between the amount of LI2M added to monocytes and the amount of acid-soluble nucleotide in these cells.In column chromatographic analysis, the acid-soluble fraction of monocyte showed apparent 11 peaks of nucleotides, that is, CMP, DPN, AMP, GMP, UMP, ADP, GDP, ATP, UTP and GTP. Among acid-soluble nucleotides in monocytes with LI2M, the amount of adenine nucleotide decreased clearly, especially the amount of ADP was about 42% of the control.
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