Journal
JOURNAL OF HAZARDOUS MATERIALS
Volume 400, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhazmat.2020.123308
Keywords
Polystyrene; Microplastics; Statistical shape analysis; Immune response; Cytotoxicity
Categories
Funding
- Ministry of Science and ICT [NRF-2017R1E1A1A01074343]
- Ministry of Science ICT [NRF-2016M3A9C6917405]
- National Research Foundation of Korea [4199990414483, 2016M3A9C6917402] Funding Source: Korea Institute of Science & Technology Information (KISTI), National Science & Technology Information Service (NTIS)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
With the increase in plastic production, a variety of toxicological studies on microplastics have been conducted as microplastics can be accumulated in the human body and cause unknown disease. However, previous studies have mainly assessed the toxicity of sphere-type microbeads, which may differ from randomly-shaped microplastics in a real environment. Here, we conducted in vitro toxicology analysis for randomly-shaped microplastics based on the hypotheses that (1) physical cytotoxicity is affected by nano-/micro-size roughness in polystyrene (PS) microfragments and (2) chemical toxicity is caused by chemical reagents from microplastics. We confirmed that the PS microfragments increased the acute inflammation of immune cells 20 times than control, the production of reactive oxygen species, and cell death of fibroblasts and cancer cells by releasing chemical reagents. In addition, when the PS microfragments were in direct contact with fibroblasts and red blood cells, the physical stress caused by them resulted in lactose dehydrogenase and hemoglobin release, respectively, due to cell membrane damage and hemolysis. This phenomenon was amplified when the concentration and roughness of the microfragments increased. Moreover, we quantitatively analyzed roughness differences between microplastics, which revealed a strong relationship between the physical damage of cells and the roughness of microplastics.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available