Abstract
Nanoplastic particulates (pNP) are widely considered as being potentially harmful to the environment and living organisms while also being technically difficult to detect and identify in the presence of biological matrices. In this study, we describe a method for the extraction and subsequent Raman analysis of pNP present in the tissues of salt-water mussels. The process combines a step of enzymatic digestion/filtering to eliminate the biological matrix with a detection/identification procedure, which uses a micro-machined surface, composed of arrays of cavities with well-defined sub-micron depths and diameters. This sensor surface, exploits capillary forces in a drying droplet of analyte solution to drive the self-assembly of suspended nanoparticles into the cavities leaving the individual particles isolated from each other over the surface. The resulting array, when analysed using confocal Raman microscopy, permits the size selective analysis of the individual sub-micron pNP trapped in the cavities structure.
Highlights
Nanoplastic particulates are widely considered as being potentially harmful to the environment and living organisms while being technically difficult to detect and identify in the presence of biological matrices
For similar set-up the PS single particle detection limit via Confocal Raman Microscopy (CRM) was found to lie around 300–500 nm (PS-particulate nanoplastics (pNP) radius, or equivalently a volume between 0.11–0.52 μm3)
We report in Figure SI4e the EDS elemental analysis of nano-objects detected by SEM after the focused ion beam (FIB) cleaning (Figure SI4a-c)
Summary
Nanoplastic particulates (pNP) are widely considered as being potentially harmful to the environment and living organisms while being technically difficult to detect and identify in the presence of biological matrices. In samples containing a significant proportion of biological material such as cells or tissue, matrix effects and residual surface contamination greatly complicate what is already a difficult analytical task As it is typical of emerging research fields, a single harmonized definition and classification of environmental nano, micro and meso-plastics has still to be widely a greed[6]. The use of chemical digestion by oxidizing, acidic or basic media to digest biological matrices has been reported to degrade, to varying extents, even large pMP present in simulated environmental samples[10] and it is probable that the use of such treatments on pNP or the smaller pMPs, would risk an uncontrollable loss of particulates In such cases the softer alternative, enzymatic digestion, may provide a better compromise between digestion efficiency and sample integrity[11], especially when dealing with samples containing a high proportion of biological m atter[12,13]
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