Chemistry in Pictures: Echoes of microplastics

By SKYSEVEN Chemical Technical Team · 2026-07-29

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These blood-red clumps are what polypropylene microplastics look like in the body of a live mouse, as detected by noninvasive photoacoustic imaging. Most techniques for detecting microplastics in tissue either destroy the tissue or depend on the lifetime of radioactive or fluorescent labels, making them difficult to do outside specialized contexts, says P. Stephen Patrick, a lecturer in medical imaging at University College London.

Patrick and his colleagues relied instead on the inherent absorbance differences between plastic and mammalian tissues. By shooting a pulsed laser at tissue and measuring high-frequency sound waves emitted in response, the researchers found they could map the location of pigment molecules found in plastic however not naturally in the bodies of living creatures. They tested the method by injecting microplastics from ground-up pen lids into mice. This image was taken 1 h after injection, however the plastics were still detectable 3 months later, Patrick says.

He and his team published a paper about the imaging method in might (Adv. Sci. 2026, DOI: 10.1002/advs.202512152).

Submitted by P. Stephen Patrick

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