Nanoplastics are neither microplastics nor engineered nanoparticles

Abstract

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Searching Nanoplastics: From Sampling to Sample Processing

“…On the basis of this review work, it is considered more appropriate for the analysis of nanoplastics to follow the approach used for engineered nanomaterials rather than that for microplastics [34].…”

“…Furthermore, in real samples a mix of polymers can be found and the composition, additives, and characteristic products of each polymer are difficult to distinguish from each other [46]. As the plastic size decreases, the contribution of organic matter/microbial increases influencing the transport, uptake, and accumulation pathways of NPs [34]. Furthermore, the nanoscale size limits chemical analysis techniques; all the techniques that are popular in MPs analysis have a limited application for NPs.…”

“…About the analytical approaches one of the main complication is the heteroaggregation that can interfere from the background material, carbon in particular [41,47]. Moreover, for the aggregates the similarity of the NPs is closer to that of the ENMs rather than to the MPs: they form heteroaggregates similar to microorganisms and natural organic matter [34]. Aging: all the factors previously mentioned (e.g., UV, biodegradation, atmospheric agents) alter the surface characteristics of NPs, generating many by-products that cannot be ignored [48].…”

“…Later, the MPs and NPs can release those POPs to organisms upon ingestion [31][32][33] and could impact human health, therefore it is important to determine their fate and amount. Considering their size and interaction with the biota, NPs can be distinguished from MPs and, in particular, from the engineered nanoparticles [34], therefore an increase of difficulty to analyze NPs in the environmental matrices can be expected. There are no specific methodologies for NPs and often the same techniques used for MPs are adapted.…”

Development of Microfluidic, Serum-Free Bronchial Epithelial Cells-on-a-Chip to Facilitate a More Realistic In vitro Testing of Nanoplastics

“…Most in vitro toxicological studies use polystyrene (PS) NPs as model particles and, for the most part, toxicity is only observed at high concentrations or following longterm exposure, unless the NPs are endowed with a positive surface charge, as is the case for amino-functionalized PS NPs which were shown to be toxic towards a range of cell types (Anguissola et al, 2014;Mrakovcic et al, 2014;Ruenraroengsak and Tetley, 2015;Hesler et al, 2019;He et al, 2020). Notwithstanding the fact that spherical NPs may not be representative of the heterogenous features of plastic debris (Gigault et al, 2021), the question remains whether traditional cell culture models are suitable for the evaluation of nanoplastics. Cho et al (2011) investigated cellular uptake of gold NPs using upright and inverted cell culture configurations and found that uptake depends on the sedimentation and diffusion velocities and is independent of size, shape, density, and surface coating of the NPs.…”