Scientists at Loyola University Chicago used museum collections to study the intestines
What are microplastics? These are small particles of plastic of any kind, the marking does not matter. In 2004, marine biologist Richard Thompson identified pieces of plastic no larger than 5mm as a separate category.
To make it clearer, imagine a handful of beads:small, plastic, multi-colored. If you scatter it around the room, then most likely you will not collect all the beads, they will remain in the cracks behind the furniture. So it is with microplastics - it cannot be separated from water, soil, air. Particles of the finest fraction do not lend themselves to filtration.
Microplastics pollute our environment, theythe final stop is human organisms, animals, fish, birds, insects. Through them it can be transmitted to humans. The problem of environmental pollution with microplastics has become relevant right now, because before this its quantity did not cause concern. Now it has accumulated and caused invisible but dangerous pollution. However, the authors of the new study wanted to understand how microplastics accumulated over the last century. They used fish specimens from the Chicago Field Museum. There, 2 million samples are stored in alcohol and in an underground collection.
Biologists have focused on four speciesfish: largemouth bass, channel catfish, sandies and round gobies. Records of the life of these species date from 2017 to 1900. Scientists also collected fresh samples of the same animal species for study.
Researchers used scalpels and tweezers toexcision of the digestive tract, and then treated with hydrogen peroxide. It destroys all organic matter, but leaves behind any potential plastics.
Scientists have used microscopes toidentify materials with suspiciously smooth edges that may indicate microplastics. Then, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Toronto, the scientists confirmed their chemical signatures using Raman spectroscopy.
Plastics were not detected until the middlelast century. The amount of microplastics in the intestines of the studied fish rose sharply with the rise in plastic production in the middle of the last century, starting in the 1950s.
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Raman spectroscopy is a type of spectroscopy, which is based on the ability of the studied systems to inelastic scattering of monochromatic light.