Microplastics destabilize lipid membranes by mechanical stretching, 2021, Fleury & Baulin

Microplastics destabilize lipid membranes by mechanical stretching
Jean-Baptiste Fleury and Vladimir A. Baulin

Significance
The effects of plastic pollution on living organisms is a highly debated subject. There is no direct evidence of high toxicity of microplastic abundantly present in the environment. Nevertheless, microplastic particles can cross many biological barriers and come in direct contact with lipid membranes, which is the last cell protective barrier from the environment.

This study demonstrates that microplastic beads ranging from 1 to 10 μm attach to lipid membranes. This attachment leads to significant stretching of the lipid bilayer without requiring any oxidative, or biological, e.g., inflammatory, reactions. This mechanical stretching can potentially lead to serious dysfunction of the cell machinery.

Abstract
Estimated millions of tons of plastic are dumped annually into oceans. Plastic has been produced only for 70 y, but the exponential rise of mass production leads to its widespread proliferation in all environments. As a consequence of their large abundance globally, microplastics are also found in many living organisms including humans.

While the health impact of digested microplastics on living organisms is debatable, we reveal a physical mechanism of mechanical stretching of model cell lipid membranes induced by adsorbed micrometer-sized microplastic particles most commonly found in oceans. Combining experimental and theoretical approaches, we demonstrate that microplastic particles adsorbed on lipid membranes considerably increase membrane tension even at low particle concentrations. Each particle adsorbed at the membrane consumes surface area that is proportional to the contact area between particle and the membrane.

Although lipid membranes are liquid and able to accommodate mechanical stress, the relaxation time is much slower than the rate of adsorption; thus, the cumulative effect from arriving microplastic particles to the membrane leads to the global reduction of the membrane area and increase of membrane tension. This, in turn, leads to a strong reduction of membrane lifetime. The effect of mechanical stretching of microplastics on living cells membranes was demonstrated by using the aspiration micropipette technique on red blood cells. The described mechanical stretching mechanism on lipid bilayers may provide better understanding of the impact of microplastic particles in living systems.

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There is a change.org petition calling for more research into the health effects of micro plastics in the human blood system. See https://chng.it/WjNTGQJjm5

Though it is worded specifically in relation to the UK government, as it is change.org it can be signed from anywhere in the world.

 

This isn't ideal considering recent findings of microplastics in the blood of most people tested for, including infants.

 

this is truly a disaster.... our economy and technology is based on plastics, how can we possible revert this at the source?

 

Oh it's too late to reverse this. With millions of tons of plastics in the oceans, basically all water on the planet will have a minimum concentration of microplastics and it will increase over time. They're even found deep in Antarctica, which would imply some of the smallest particles can become airborne and get carried to rain wherever currents take them.

It's like the whole lead thing, except worse. Somehow environmental medicine continues to be mostly a joke, it pales in comparison to the obsession with everything psychosocial, so even though we know pollution is one of the most significant health risks, almost nothing is being done because health care is still restricted to clinics and available hospital beds, we simply don't do whole-of-society health yet. Best we can do is a bunch of small biased questionnaires that can be interpreted in many ways. Somehow.

And with the continued obsession with the BPS ideology, that's not about to change. Maybe it's not as bad as it seems, but given the precedent of vaporized lead and how it was dismissed on the same basis of: what precautionary principle? It doesn't look good.

 

I am also worried about PFAS which is somehow an issue I only discovered relatively recently. When people said "forever chemicals" I thought they were talking about something else. Must be everywhere by now. Food packaging. Yikes. Between the microplastics and PFAS I don't know what to worry about more.

 

I had to look up PFAS:

taken from https://www.ewg.org/pfaschemicals/what-are-forever-chemicals.html

 

If anyone is interested and has the capacity for such things, there was even a movie about this quite recently (with Mark Ruffalo playing a lawyer as the main character): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)

 

I would like to see the oil companies and chemical companies responsible for plastic manufacturing be regulated first by reducing the number of unrecylcable plastics to a small number of recyclable ones. Why do we need so many different grades/types of plastic wrap for example. I grew up with waxed paper sandwich wrap and paper bag, metal lunch pails.

Then a huge effort needs to be implemented in breakdown of plastics already in the air and sea and in animals like us, with bacteria recruited for this, or whatever works.

We need to rein in the chemical industry and the plastic industry as well as the oil industry. It's obscene the lack of leadership to this matter. We are poisoning ourselves and other creatures, though i suppose that is the slow history of our species...alas.