Fluorescent Dyes for Visualizing Microplastic Particles and Fibers in Laboratory-Based Studies

By Evan G. Karakolis, Brian Nguyen, Jae Bem You, Chelsea M. Rochman, David Sinton. Environmental Science and Technology Letters, 2019

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Observing microplastics in manipulative experiments is of paramount importance for understanding the fate of microplastics in the environment, organisms, and food webs. Labeling microplastics with fluorescent dyes is a useful tool in laboratory experiments for tracking microplastics. However, literature using fluorescence-based detection is heavily biased toward the use of polystyrene and polyethylene microspheres, potentially due to their commercial availability. Consequently, much less is understood about the fate of nonspherical morphologies and other types of plastics common in the environment. Presented here is a heat-mediated microplastic dyeing protocol that facilitates the stable incorporation of inexpensive commercially available fluorescent disperse dyes directly into the polymer structure for use in laboratory-based studies. We demonstrate this microplastic labeling approach is compatible with a wide variety of plastic types [polystyrene (PS), low-density polyethylene (LDPE), high-density polye...

Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca27182fd1ab479fa1d83f8b501de4288412e64a

Citations in the corpus

• Reporting Guidelines to Increase the Reproducibility and Comparability of Research on Microplastics (2020, unknown): “…polymer, molecular characteristics, size, color, texture, and shape 86,87 Synthesized plastic synthesis technique 86,88 Fluorescent dye Dye type, concentration, and solvent used 89–91 Dye application technique 89 Sieving strategy Sieve mesh size 84 If the sample was wet or dry sieved 84 (continued)”