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Altered Biological Responses of Primary Producers to Multiple Stressors in the Presence of Nanoplastics
Summary
This thesis investigated how nanoplastics interact with other environmental stressors — including elevated CO2, temperature, and light — to affect freshwater algae and cyanobacteria. The results show that nanoplastics can alter how aquatic plants respond to climate change, potentially disrupting the base of freshwater food webs.
The interactions between nanoplastics and factors that simultaneous present in the aquatic environment, including climatic change stressors and local chemicals, are largely unknown. This thesis presents methods to understand how nanoplastics will affect species or interfere with their response to local chemicals in concert with climate change in freshwater ecosystems. With the aid of a high-throughput screening platform, we first discovered the interactive effects among nanoplastics, CO2, light, and temperature on freshwater algae, Scenedesmus obliquus. We then studied the control of CyanoHABs considering nanoplastics contamination and captured the non-additive combined effect of H2O2 and nanoplastics on freshwater cyanobacteria, Microcystis aeruginosa. Using these methods adopted here, one can screen a wide range of stressors combinations, identify interesting ones, then study chronic effects at those levels. They also provided improved accuracy and realism in nanoplastics exposure experiments to properly depict local aquatic conditions and investigate the subsequent ecological impacts on aquatic life.