By Deanna Wolfson
While more and more people are becoming concerned about the impacts of microplastics on health and the environment, much of the research has been on larger particles which are easier to see and detect. However, these can easily be 100X larger than cells, and there is significantly less known about how cells interact with microplastics that are smaller than they are. Recently, members of our team worked together with researchers from the Norwegian College of Fishery Science to publish their work showing that plastic and silica particles approximately 100X smaller than the thickness of a human hair end up inside salmon skin and eye cells, after being exposed for just one hour. Their data suggests that at least some of these particles may end up in lysosomes – part of the cell’s recycling system – but more research is needed to better understand both how they get into the cell and what happens to them and the cells once they are there. This work used a combination of fluorescence microscopy and a relatively new, label-free technique called holotomography to get 3D maps of the cells, and the data is being made publicly available for anyone to explore for themselves.