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“Nonlinear” pursuit of understanding pollutant accumulation and chemistry at environmental and biological interfaces
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This perspective paper highlights how specialized nonlinear spectroscopy techniques — typically used in surface chemistry — can be applied to study how pollutants like nanoplastics and PFAS compounds adsorb and react at aqueous interfaces in the environment and in biological systems. Understanding interfacial chemistry is important because how a pollutant behaves at a surface (such as a cell membrane or water-air interface) determines its toxicity and environmental fate. The paper argues these techniques are underused tools for nanoplastic risk research.
Over the past few decades, the public recognition of the prevalence of certain classes of pollutants, such as perfluoroalkyl substances and nanoplastics, within the environment, has sparked growing concerns over their potential impact on environmental and human health. Within both environmental and biological systems, the adsorption and structural organization of pollutants at aqueous interfaces can greatly impact the chemical reactivity and transformation. Experimentally probing chemical behavior at interfaces can often pose a problem due to bulk solvated molecules convoluting molecular signatures from interfacial molecules. To solve this problem, there exist interface-specific nonlinear spectroscopy techniques that can directly probe both macroscopic planar interfaces and nanoplastic interfaces in aqueous environments. These techniques can provide essential information such as chemical adsorption, structure, and reactivity at interfaces. In this perspective, these techniques are presented with obvious advantages for studying the chemical properties of pollutants adsorbed to environmental and biological interfaces.
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