Quantum nanoparticles have been applied extensively in biological and medical fields, the cytotoxicity of nanoparticles becomes the key point we should concern. In this paper, the cytotoxicity of three kinds of water-soluble nanoparticles: CdTe, CdTe@SiO2 and Mn:ZnSe was studied. We evaluated the nanoparticles toxicity qualitatively by observing the morphological changes of human osteoblast-like MG-63 cells at different incubation times and colorimetric 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyl tetrazolium bromide (MTT) assays were carried out to detect the cell viability quantitatively. The results showed that CdTe nanoparticles with high concentrations caused cells to die largely while CdTe@SiO2 and Mn:ZnSe nanoparticles had no obvious effect. For further study, we studied the relation between the cell viability and the total cadmium concentration in cells and found that the viability of cells treated with CdTe@SiO2 nanoparticles was higher than that treated with CdTe nanoparticles. We also discovered that the death rate of cells co-incubated with CdTe nanoparticles was proportional to the total intracellular cadmium concentrations. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.