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Pathways to Identifying the Impacts of Microplastic Exposure on Aquatic Vertebrate Immunity
Summary
Tiny plastic particles called micro- and nanoplastics are showing up everywhere in our environment, including the Great Lakes, which supply drinking water to 40 million people. This paper reviews what scientists currently know about how these plastics affect the immune systems of fish and amphibians, and proposes using frogs as a model to better understand potential health risks, research that could eventually help us understand how these particles might affect human health too, since we're exposed to the same water sources and contaminants.
Microplastics (MPs) (1 μm - 5 mm-) are now ubiquitous in the environment. They exhibit a variety of different shapes and compositions and accumulate in organs of virtually every organism. Recently, biomedical researchers have focused on nanoplastics (NP) (1 nm -1 μm ) because of their potential to enter organisms, cross cell barriers, and impact biological processes. Taken together, micro- and nano-plastics (MNP) are increasingly considered a contaminant of concern in freshwater systems such as the Laurentian Great Lakes in North America, which provide drinking water for 40 million people in the United States and Canada. We review here the current knowledge and challenges to overcome for evaluating the long-term consequences of MNP exposure in freshwater ecosystems and their aquatic vertebrates. We demonstrate how the use of a novel animal model in the amphibian Xenopus within the context of a transdisciplinary research center has the potential to rapidly advance knowledge about key biological mechanisms and potential health impacts of environmentally-relevant MNPs.