That's a relief. Now I can stop worrying about microplastics. Just like the environment - we don't hear much about it any more, so they must have sorted that out too. Didn't they? Did they?
So the problem is these particles are literally flying off the gloves of the scientists wearing them to the point it's interfering with the experiment and so... it's less of a problem?
> To be honest, after reading some of these microplastics papers I'm starting to suspect most of them are bullshit. Plastics are everywhere in a modern lab and rarely do these papers have proper controls, which I suspect would show that there is a baseline level of microplastic contamination in labs that is unavoidable. Petri dishes, pipettes, microplates, EVERYTHING is plastic, packaged in plastic, and cleaned using plastic tools, all by people wearing tons of synthetic fibers.
> We went through this same nonsense when genetic sequencers first became available until people got it into their heads that DNA contamination was everywhere and that we had to be really careful with sample collection and statistical methods. [1]
Carl Sagan was right all along. Always question science, never trust these so called experts, do your own assessment, research and thinking. This must be another global climate change scam.
Didnt they use for newest studies to detect microplastic in placentas I think only non plastic omitting alternative gloves and material. Can't recall there it was specifically mentioned in a worldclass ARTE docu about microplastics maybe some ARTE Ultras here can recall.
this feels like such a weird oversight in such a controlled environment: "oh my bad it was the gloves!"
I wonder in how many other studies this happened?
I'm amazed that wasn't taken into account! Many years ago, in the final year of my Biology degree, I did a paid summer internship at an Evolutionary Biology lab here in Spain, assisting in a project where they were researching relationships between metal ion accumulation (mostly zinc) and certain SNPs (≈"gene varieties"). A lot of my work was in slicing tiny fragments of deep-frozen human livers and kidneys in a biosafety cabinet over dry ice.
The reason I bring this up is because the researchers had taken the essential precaution of providing me with a ceramic knife to do the cutting (and platic pliers), to eliminate the risk of contaminating the samples with metal from ordinary cutting implements.
That some research on microplatics did not take into account the absolutely mental amount of single-use plastic that is involved in biological research, particularly gloves of all things, boggles the mind.
> single-use plastic that is involved in biological research
The samples were not contaminated by plastic in the gloves. Latex gloves don't contain plastic, they're made from natural rubber. Nitrile gloves also don't contain plastic, although they're very similar to plastic.
The contamination that this study found wasn't microplastic contamination. The gloves weren't adding microplastics. The gloves were adding stearates, which aren't plastic, but look like microplastic in many of the methods for measuring microplastics.
granted, I feel like maybe a review of lab equipment regularly is not a bad idea. in my low level undergraduate summer job, we realized all the stuff I did in those 3 months were moot at the end because I end up running some blanks on the pipetting robot and discovered that some glitch resulted in progressively less material being pipetted towards the end of the tray vs. the beginning....
From the study in the OP you cannot derive that current studies on microplastics are not valid. The headline framing that scientists have been measuring their own gloves, is science journalism doing what it does best...
Stearates are water soluble soaps, so any study using standard wet chemistry extraction, and that is most of them, washes them away before analysis even begins. Stearates also cant mimic polystyrene, PET, PVC, nylon, or any of the dozens of other polymers routinely found in environmental and human tissue samples.
"The researchers used air samplers which are fitted with a metal substrate. Air passes through the sampler, and particles from the atmosphere deposit onto the substrate. Then, using light-based spectroscopy, the researchers are able to determine what kind of particles are found on the substrate.
Clough prepared the substrates while wearing nitrile gloves, which is recommended by the guidance of literature in the microplastics field. But when she examined the substrates to estimate how many microplastics she captured, the results were many thousands of times greater than what she expected to find."
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The very first thing that should have been done is to run results for a substrate that hadn't been placed in the sampler. You need to know what a zero result looks like just to characterize your setup. You'd also want to run samples with known and controlled micro-plastic concentrations. Why didn't they do this? Their results are utterly meaningless if they didn't.
I guess with Raman I can see this being misidentified but I do testing with FTIR at my job, although not often for microplastics and we often detect olefins and stearates and they don't seem to get confused. I didn't realize there were stearates on nitrile gloves, we'll need to be more careful of that. We are always weary of protein contamination from people, or cellulose/nylon from clothing.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 43.9 ms ] thread> To be honest, after reading some of these microplastics papers I'm starting to suspect most of them are bullshit. Plastics are everywhere in a modern lab and rarely do these papers have proper controls, which I suspect would show that there is a baseline level of microplastic contamination in labs that is unavoidable. Petri dishes, pipettes, microplates, EVERYTHING is plastic, packaged in plastic, and cleaned using plastic tools, all by people wearing tons of synthetic fibers.
> We went through this same nonsense when genetic sequencers first became available until people got it into their heads that DNA contamination was everywhere and that we had to be really careful with sample collection and statistical methods. [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40681390
Keeping things meticulously clean on the microscopic level is a complicated task. One of the many reasons why so few EUV chip fabs even exist.
The gloves are not plastic.
The reason I bring this up is because the researchers had taken the essential precaution of providing me with a ceramic knife to do the cutting (and platic pliers), to eliminate the risk of contaminating the samples with metal from ordinary cutting implements.
That some research on microplatics did not take into account the absolutely mental amount of single-use plastic that is involved in biological research, particularly gloves of all things, boggles the mind.
The samples were not contaminated by plastic in the gloves. Latex gloves don't contain plastic, they're made from natural rubber. Nitrile gloves also don't contain plastic, although they're very similar to plastic.
The contamination that this study found wasn't microplastic contamination. The gloves weren't adding microplastics. The gloves were adding stearates, which aren't plastic, but look like microplastic in many of the methods for measuring microplastics.
"When Good Intentions Go Bad — False Positive Microplastic Detection Caused by Disposable Gloves" - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c03742
From the study in the OP you cannot derive that current studies on microplastics are not valid. The headline framing that scientists have been measuring their own gloves, is science journalism doing what it does best...
Stearates are water soluble soaps, so any study using standard wet chemistry extraction, and that is most of them, washes them away before analysis even begins. Stearates also cant mimic polystyrene, PET, PVC, nylon, or any of the dozens of other polymers routinely found in environmental and human tissue samples.
Nothing to see here.
Clough prepared the substrates while wearing nitrile gloves, which is recommended by the guidance of literature in the microplastics field. But when she examined the substrates to estimate how many microplastics she captured, the results were many thousands of times greater than what she expected to find."
------------------
The very first thing that should have been done is to run results for a substrate that hadn't been placed in the sampler. You need to know what a zero result looks like just to characterize your setup. You'd also want to run samples with known and controlled micro-plastic concentrations. Why didn't they do this? Their results are utterly meaningless if they didn't.