Isolation of microplastics in biota-rich seawater samples and marine organisms
By M. Cole, Hannah Webb, P. Lindeque, Elaine S. Fileman, C. Halsband, T. Galloway. Scientific Reports, 2014
936 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Microplastic litter is a pervasive pollutant present in aquatic systems across the globe. A range of marine organisms have the capacity to ingest microplastics, resulting in adverse health effects. Developing methods to accurately quantify microplastics in productive marine waters and those internalized by marine organisms, is of growing importance. Here we investigate the efficacy of using acid, alkaline and enzymatic digestion techniques in mineralizing biological material from marine surface trawls to reveal any microplastics present. Our optimized enzymatic protocol can digest >97% (by weight) of the material present in plankton-rich seawater samples without destroying any microplastic debris present. In applying the method to replicate marine samples from the western English Channel, we identified 0.27 microplastics m−3. The protocol was further used to extract microplastics ingested by marine zooplankton under laboratory conditions. Our findings illustrate that enzymatic digestion can aid the detection of microplastic debris within seawater samples and marine biota.
Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6703f40e8d6d1755749b28b51297167c3757c8c9
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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
In Pollution
Citations in the corpus
- Microplastics in freshwater systems: A review on occurrence, environmental effects, and methods for microplastics detection. (2017, methodology): “During the degradation process, microplastics samples are incubated with a mixture of technical enzymes such as lipase, amylase, proteinase, chitinase, and cellulose (Cole et al., 2014; L€ oder et al., 2015).”
- Microplastics in seafood: Benchmark protocol for their extraction and characterization. (2016, background): “92 They can be classified as acidic (Claessens et al., 2013; De Witte et al., 2014), alkaline (Cole et al., 93 2014; Foekema et al., 2013), oxidizing (Nuelle et al., 2014; Avio et al., 2015) and enzymatic methods 94 (Cole et al., 2014).”
- Microplastic fragments and microbeads in digestive tracts of planktivorous fish from urban coastal waters (2016, neutral): “On the other hand, fibers accounted for 68.3% of plastics in fish from the English Channel, which were identified as rayon, polyamide, or polyester 22 .”
- Beyond the ocean : Contamination of freshwater ecosystems with (micro-) plastic particles (2015, background): “In 2014, an enzymatic protocol for marine water samples was published 410 revealing that 97% of the organic material can be digested without doing harm to microplastic 411 particles ([54]).”
- First evidence of microplastics in the African Great Lakes: Recovery from Lake Victoria Nile perch and Nile tilapia (2016, methodology): “The NaOH method has been shown to digest organic matter with an ef fi cacy of N 90% (Cole et al., 2014) and our tests of this protocol prior to its use con fi rm such high ef fi ciencies (96.6 ± 0.9%, n = 5,datanot shown).”
- Extraction of microplastic from biota: recommended acidic digestion destroys common plastic polymers (2017, methodology): “Various approaches have been developed including: enzymes (Cole et al., 2014); bases such as sodium hydroxide (NaOH; Claessens et al., 2013; Cole et al., 2014) or potassium hydroxide (KOH; Foekema et al., 2013); alkaline cleaning agents (Strand and Tairova, 2015); concentrated acids such as nitric…”