Collaborative Research: Understanding "wild-type" nanoplastic uptake in single microalgae cells with fluorescence tracking and computational modeling

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Plastic products are essential for our daily life and underpin an expanding, multi-trillion-dollar global market across numerous industry sectors. However, the resulting plastic waste presents an emerging threat to environmental health and public safety. Large plastic debris gradually breaks down to nanometer-sized particles in the environment and the long-term effects of these ultrafine plastic particles remain largely unknown. This project supports fundamental research to understand the interactions of nanoplastic particles in the environment with microorganisms, which provide insight into the nanoplastic accumulation in the human food chain. The research team will combine theoretical and computational modeling with cutting edge experimental techniques to discover the relationship between particle shape, cellular entry process, and cell responses. This new knowledge gained at the nano-bio interface will enable the development of a rational hazard and risk assessment framework for nanoplastics. The educational activities of this project will motivate and train a competitive workforce for developing sustainable solutions to the plastic waste problem. The project will provide multidisciplinary and inter-institutional research experiences for graduate and undergraduate students via step-wise progression and highly structured mentoring. The team will create a symposium at professional conferences to stimulate growth of a research network on nanoplastics. The goal of the outreach is to engage local middle and high school students and to enhance the awareness of the global plastic crisis in the broader community.The goal of this project is to investigate the interactions of novel synthetic models of environmental nanoplastics with green microalgae on the single-cell level as the starting point to understand how they accumulate in the environment and to which there is subsequent human exposure. To address the need for representative surrogates of environmentally released nanoplastics, this research will create polymer-coated nanocrystals with well-defined non-spherical morphologies and surface enhanced fluorescence. A microfluidic platform will be developed for in situ and in vivo experiments of nanoplastic uptake and toxicological responses of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii cells. The team will apply the membrane elasticity theory and coarse-grained simulation to predict adsorption and internalization of anisotropic nanoparticles by lipid membranes on different length scales. The integration of experimentation and multiscale modeling will allow the testing of key hypotheses that irregular surface morphology influences individual uptake and collective internalization of environmental nanoplastics. The project activities will be accomplished by integrating graduate students through collaborative and structured mentoring, as well as by providing course-based research experiences to undergraduate students, particularly those from groups traditionally underrepresented in science and engineering. The educational component of the project will also support the development of a topical symposium at the ACS Northeast Regional Meetings, a webinar series, and a plastic pollution exhibition at the annual National Engineers Week Community Day to engage broad research and education communities around nanoplastics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.