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Investigation of optical properties of microplastics
Summary
Researchers collected sand from Los Angeles beaches and studied the optical properties of naturally occurring microplastics using a laser-tweezer setup. The resulting database of optical characteristics is intended to help develop tools for detecting microplastics and studying their interactions with ocean microorganisms.
The number of microplastics in aquatic environments is increasing rapidly in recent years and making ocean microplastics one of the major environmental problems. In our research, we focus on the isolation of nature-found microplastics by collecting sand from Los Angeles beaches. Since the optical studies of nature-found microplastics are nontrivial, we generate a standard database by creating and studying different types of irregular-shaped lab-made microplastics using optical tweezer setup. The created database is used to characterize the optical properties of nature-found microplastics. We are planning to apply these results to investigate microplastic interactions with ocean microplankton at a cellular level.