The outburst of plastic pollution in terrestrial ecosystems poses a potential threat to agriculture and food safety. Studies have already provided evidence for the uptake of plastic microparticles by several plant species, accompanied by numerous developmental effects, using fluorescence labelling techniques. Here, we introduce the implementation of confocal Raman spectroscopy, a label-free method, for the effective detection of microplastics (MPs) accumulation in the roots of a common edible root vegetable plant, Raphanus sativus, after treatment with acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) powder. We also demonstrate the concomitant occurrence of phenotypic defects in the polymer-treated plants. We anticipate that this work can provide new insights not only into the extent of the impact this widespread phenomenon has on crop plants but also on the methodological requirements to address it.

In this study we demonstrate that it is possible to perform velocity mapping and slice imaging of charged particle products using a single field (two electrodes) improving on the multielectrode geometries of the past. The performance of this new geometry is competitive to the multielectrode ones, presently limited by detector “spot” resolution. For imaging both photoelectrons and photofragments a resolution of ∼1% in velocity is achieved without further software manipulation such as event counting. The advantages of this new design are its ability to focus large volumes, its achromaticity (very little sensitivity on photofragment velocities), independence of the laser beam position in the field perpendicular to the extraction field, and compactness. Using this new design we have studied the photodissociation dynamics of pyrrole at 243nm and show that internal conversion of electronically excited state molecules to the ground state is important even at such low excitation energies.