One reason plastics are used so often is that they’re chemically inert, meaning bags, food containers, and cups don't react with what we put in them. Yet they can still break down into microplastics, which turn up in drinking water, human blood, arteries, and brains. The consequences of that are uncertain.

“Whether microplastics can directly cause human disease is still being researched,” said Wei Min, a chemist at Columbia University. In a new Nature study, Min's team took a step toward answering this question by demonstrating that microplastics are likely not as chemically inert as we might expect.

Min's lab has spent years working on microdroplet chemistry, studying how water broken into tiny droplets behaves at its boundary with air. These droplets have been reported to generate reactive oxygen species, or ROS, a family of harmful, oxygen-containing molecules. “ROS will essentially bump into proteins, lipids, DNA, and cause damage,” Min said. “You could break a DNA strand into segments. You could mutate DNA; you could misfold proteins.”

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