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Eco-Corona of Microplastics in Soil Inhibits Their Role as a Contaminant Vector While Enhancing Their Role as a Microorganism Vector
Summary
When microplastics sit in soil, they quickly get coated with a natural film of soil nutrients and molecules (like a sticky residue). This coating actually makes microplastics slightly less likely to soak up harmful chemical pollutants, but it makes them more attractive to microbes, helping bacteria (including potentially harmful ones) hitch a ride and spread. This matters because it means microplastics' risks aren't just about carrying toxic chemicals — they may play an even bigger role in spreading germs through soil, water, and eventually our food.
Microplastics are an environmental vector for both chemical contaminants and microorganisms. Key to this role is the formation of an eco-corona on microplastic surfaces, which influences surface interactions with the surrounding environment. To better understand this, we investigated the composition and formation mechanism of the eco-corona on the surface of microplastics from soil metabolites, and how this affected the sorption of organic contaminants and the colonization of early biofilms. Soil metabolites formed an eco-corona on microplastics primarily through van der Waals interactions, resulting in hard and soft eco-corona layers via multilayer adsorption. The eco-corona not only acted as a barrier, partially preventing exogenous organic contaminants sorbing onto microplastics, but also functioned as a novel sorption layer for organic contaminants. Through this combined effect, the eco-corona reduced organic contaminant sorption by 14.4-19.8%. Additionally, the eco-corona accelerated and enhanced the biotic vector role of microplastics by regulating their initial microbial colonization, thereby enhancing deterministic processes in community assembly. Our findings demonstrate that the eco-corona, a surficial component of microplastics, serves as a "second surface" in governing the environmental behavior of microplastics, necessitating its incorporation in risk assessments of microplastics in terrestrial environments.