Suspended particles play a significant role in aquatic systems. However, existing methods to probe suspended particles have several limitations. In this paper, we present a portable prototype to in situ probe individual particles in aquatic suspensions by simultaneously measuring polarized light scattering and fluorescence, aiming to obtain an effective classification of microplastics and microalgae. Results show that the obtained classification accuracy is significantly higher than that for either of these two methods. The setup also successfully measures submicron particles and discriminates two species of Synechococcus. Our study demonstrates the feasibility of simultaneously measuring polarized light scattering and fluorescence, and the promising capability of our method for further aquatic environmental monitoring.

Microalgae play a vital role in aquatic ecological research, but the fine classification of these tiny and various microalgae cells is still challenging for the community. In this paper, we propose a multimodality technique to simultaneously acquire the polarized light scattering, fluorescence and laser-induced acoustic wave signals originated from individual microalgae cells in water. Experiments of different species of Spirulina and different states of Microcystis have been conducted to test our experiment setup, and the results demonstrate that this method can well discriminate microalgae cells with pigment or microstructural differences. Moreover, with these modalities, the consumption of absorbed energy is evaluated quantitively, and a possible way to assess photosynthesis on a single-cell level is presented. This work is expected to be a powerful technique to probe the biophysical states of microalgae in the aquatic ecosystem.