Zhou Fang, Wang Xin, Wang Guangxin, Zuo Yanxia
The Analysis and Testing Center, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430072, China.
Toxics. 2022 Mar 2;10(3):118. doi: 10.3390/toxics10030118.
With the increasing use and release of plastic products, microplastics have rapidly accumulated in ecological environments. When microplastics enter the food chain, they cause serious harm to organisms and humans. Microplastics pollution has become a growing concern worldwide; however, there is still no standardized method for rapidly and accurately detecting microplastics. In this work, we used fluorescence lifetime imaging technology to detect four kinds of Nile red-stained and unstained microplastics, and the unique phasor fingerprints of different microplastics were obtained by phasor analysis. Tracing the corresponding pixels of the "fingerprint" in the fluorescence lifetime image allowed for the quick and intuitive identification of different microplastics and their location distributions in a mixed sample. In our work, compared with staining the four microplastics with a fluorescent dye, using the phasor "fingerprint library" formed by the autofluorescence lifetimes of the microplastics was more easily distinguished than microplastics in the mixed samples. The feasibility of this method was further tested by adding three single substances-SiO, chitin and decabromodiphenyl ethane (DBDPE), and surface sediments to simulate interferent in the environment, and the results providing potential applications for the identification and analysis of microplastics in complex environments.
随着塑料制品的使用和排放日益增加，微塑料已在生态环境中迅速累积。当微塑料进入食物链时，会对生物体和人类造成严重危害。微塑料污染已成为全球日益关注的问题；然而，目前仍没有快速、准确检测微塑料的标准化方法。在这项工作中，我们使用荧光寿命成像技术检测了四种尼罗红染色和未染色的微塑料，并通过相量分析获得了不同微塑料独特的相量指纹。在荧光寿命图像中追踪“指纹”的相应像素，能够快速直观地识别混合样品中不同的微塑料及其位置分布。在我们的工作中，与用荧光染料对四种微塑料进行染色相比，利用微塑料自身荧光寿命形成的相量“指纹库”在混合样品中比微塑料更容易区分。通过添加三种单一物质——二氧化硅、几丁质和十溴二苯醚（DBDPE）以及表层沉积物来模拟环境中的干扰物，进一步测试了该方法的可行性，结果为复杂环境中微塑料的识别和分析提供了潜在应用。
