On the Forefront of Microplastic Research
A Colby professor and his students are part of a cutting-edge project to measure microplastics in human tissue
Tiny plastic particles are found just about everywhere: in the ocean, in the soil, in every ecosystem on the planet, in animals, and plants. They’re in human bodies, too, with a recent—and unnerving—study indicating that our brains may contain up to a spoon’s worth of tiny plastic shards.
Now, scientists, including some at Colby, are trying to determine if mothers can transfer microplastics to their babies while still in the womb. They’re also looking at the health implications of that and the original sources of the plastic contamination.
Associate Professor of Chemistry Greg Drozd and some of his students are working with scientists at the Shaw Institute in Blue Hill and at NYU Langone Health, one of the largest health systems in the Northeast, to seek answers to these questions.
Beginning last fall, Drozd and his students have examined placenta tissue samples donated by obstetric patients at NYU Langone under a powerful microscope in his lab in the Keyes Science Building to find and identify microplastics.
“This has the opportunity to put Colby at the forefront of microplastic research,” Drozd said. “And the skills and the research opportunity for the students is just absolutely immense. Students can learn new techniques, learn new science, and learn microscope techniques. All of that is useful, aside from the exciting part of being engaged in research that makes a difference in people’s lives.”
Origins of the project
The work with the Shaw Institute is an example of Colby’s growing network of partnerships with leading research institutions doing work in public health. The project grew out of the institute’s work studying microplastics in the environment. Tiny plastic particles are the most abundant form of solid waste pollution on Earth, and scientists at the nonprofit institute have pioneered techniques to find them in ocean water and in marine creatures like molluscs. Shaw researchers have found that in Maine, each oyster and mussel contains an average of 177 plastic particles.
“As we kept working on our research, we got more interest from physicians who would say, ‘You can do this work with oysters and kelp. Can you do it with human tissue?’” said Charlie Rolsky, executive director of the institute.
Eventually, Shaw researchers figured out how to do that. They learned how to break down the tissue without doing too much damage to the plastic particles within it, a development that has allowed collaboration on disease research with institutions, including Harvard University, Arizona State University, and NYU.
Last fall, the National Institutes of Health awarded a joint competitive grant for $400,000 to the Shaw Institute and New York University Grossman School of Medicine, which is part of NYU Langone Health. The grant supports a two-year study to explore how microplastics affect the health of mother and fetus during pregnancy.
“It’s not always easy to directly connect a health outcome to the presence of something, like when we’re surrounded by pollutants, but there’s a big push to understand it if it’s there,” Rolsky said.
Colby, which has had a long-standing relationship with the Shaw Institute, is participating in the grant through the work Drozd and his students are doing in his lab.
Being able to measure environmental exposures in human biosamples is a necessary first step that will allow future studies to begin to evaluate health risks associated with exposure, said Whitney Cowell, an assistant professor in the departments of pediatrics and population health at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
The Colby contingent has been a valuable addition to the research project, she said.
“It is great to have a multidisciplinary team, as each of us brings unique skills and expertise to the project,” she said. “For example, I am an epidemiologist and help run our birth cohort study that is generating the samples, but I do not have the skills to run the lab analyses required to measure the microplastics.”
A powerful microscope
Drozd is a physical chemist whose research on ozone pollution, vehicle exhaust, and microplastics has important applications to climate and human health.
“I’m interested in what goes into the atmosphere and then what happens to it after it gets there, and a lot of what happens in the atmosphere is the formation of very small particles,” he said. “As an atmospheric chemist, I’m interested in these small particles.”
When he came to Colby, he used start-up funds and a Kresge Foundation grant to purchase a Raman confocal microscope, one of the few in Maine. With the powerful microscope, users can create a three-dimensional map of what they’re looking at and detailed chemical information about the sample, which is helpful when understanding the chemistry of atmospheric particles. It has other applications, too, he said.
“It’s also good at looking at organic molecules that are very small, and I knew that I would be able to do microplastic research with it,” Drozd said. “The unique thing is that [with the microscope] we can identify something that might look like just a fiber or fragment on the slide as plastic.”
A couple of years ago, Rolsky got in touch with Drozd to ask about the microscope because the institute was considering buying one of their own, but after the two scientists started talking they realized that a collaboration between Colby and the Shaw Institute for this project made a lot of sense.
“They’ve got this going here, and why don’t we just work with them?” Drozd recalled thinking. “It’s a particularly great opportunity because it’s such a potentially impactful study.”
‘Searching a football field for a nickel’
Now, the Shaw researchers receive tissue samples from NYU, then use a tool to “digest” them and create a filter made from a gram of the resulting substance. What’s left on the filter, which can be as small as a quarter, includes microplastic particles. The Shaw Institute does have a specialized mass spectrometer that can help them identify plastic particles, but it doesn’t provide information about what the particles look like. The Raman confocal microscope can.
“They’re complementary methods, absolutely,” Drozd said. “The idea is that microplastics are this pervasive pollutant, and how might that affect pregnancy? Our part of the project is to find these particles.”
Students are helping him carefully scan the filters, a time-consuming task. It takes around two hours to scan one sample.
“It’s kind of like needing to search a football field for a nickel, and there’s five nickels in the field,” Drozd said. “You have to be focused the whole time while you’re doing this proverbial walk in the football field.”
Sam Skiffington ’26, a chemistry major, made a prototype for a protective filter cover, or housing, that should keep the samples from getting contaminated by microplastics in the atmosphere. He used a 3D printer he built after high school and the Mule Works Innovation Lab, a maker space located in Miller Library, to make the filter covers.
The task offered opportunities for a different kind of problem-solving, Drozd said. “We genuinely have a lot of fun thinking about what we need to build, how we’ll build it, what we’ll make it out of, all of that.”
Helping to solve the puzzle
For Skiffington, who also spends hours a week hunting for specks of microplastics in the filters, it’s been exciting to be at the forefront of a research project that has real-world implications.
“As a collective, we don’t know much about microplastics, and this project is giving us information,” he said. “We should know what’s going on in our body, ideally, and based on what we’re finding, there’s a lot of plastic. We’re also setting, hopefully, a scientific standard.”
Sophia Hausladen ’27, a Spanish and chemistry: cell and molecular biology/biochemistry double major, uses the microscope to scour the filters for “anything that looks abnormal,” laborious work that turns exciting when she finds a piece of microplastic. Drozd has taken the time to walk her through every aspect of Colby’s part of the project, including how to analyze the readings and how to determine what is good data and what is not.
“I really do like doing this because I feel like I’m learning a ton, and I’m very interested in everything that I’m learning,” she said. “There are so many unknowns, and we’re trying to find a little tiny piece of the whole puzzle.”
For Rolsky, the partnership with Colby on this project has been very positive—and they are just getting started.
“It’s really neat to see how much Colby invests in their students and in science,” he said.
