Plastic pollution is a growing environmental concern.
In addition
to posing hazards to wildlife, micro- and nano-scale plastic particles
can adsorb toxic small molecules from polluted waterways, which may
be released when these plastic particles are ingested by animals or
humans. Previous NMR studies have examined the binding between surface-modified
polystyrene nanoparticles and amino acids as models for small molecules
with a variety of functional groups. These previous studies, however,
could only examine the liquid phase and therefore focused on the small
molecules. In the current study, we use comprehensive multiphase NMR
(CMP-NMR) to examine both the small molecules and polystyrene nanoparticles
in all phases including liquid, solid, and gel-like phases. Through
proton spectral editing techniques and 13C solid-state
NMR experiments, we find that the polystyrene nanoparticles contain
both solid and gel-like fractions. The bound amino acid exists primarily
in the gel-like phase, with very little amino acid existing in the
true solid phase. This suggests that the bound amino acid interacts
with the nanoparticle shell rather than the solid-like core. These
experiments relied on the ability of CMP-NMR to separately observe
the solid, liquid, and gel-like phases of the same sample and demonstrate
the complementary nature of this approach for understanding complex
multiphase systems.