Abstract
Aqueous concentrations of nanoplastics are critical for their risk assessment. Here we developed an optical manipulation and surface-enhanced Raman scattering set-up to capture, enrich and detect nanoplastics in aquatic environments. A small-sized (20 µm) gold nanoparticle stack was used to design a gold nanoparticle stack/polylactic acid optical tweezer, and individual nanoplastics were precisely manipulated. A large-sized (80 µm) gold nanoparticle stack enabled massive enrichment of nanoplastics, and high enrichment recoveries (for example, 89.3–94.3% for polystyrene) and low limits of detection (for example, 150 ng l−1 for polystyrene) of nanoplastics were achieved. Moreover, interference from natural organic matter was eliminated by adding a cleaning step before detection. The nanoplastics in natural waters (required volume, ≤7.2 ml) were thus successfully enriched and analysed, with determined concentrations of polystyrene nanoplastics of 6.5–8.5, 1.4–1.8 and 0.7–1.0 μg l−1 for water samples from a river, a mariculture farm and a beach, respectively. This newly developed optical manipulation–surface-enhanced Raman scattering approach is able to simultaneously enrich and detect nanoplastics in natural waters.
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Data availability
The raw data that support the findings of this study are available via Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28104761 (ref. 34). Source data are provided with this paper.
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Acknowledgements
This work was funded by Laoshan Laboratory (grant no. LSKJ202203901), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 42206191, 42192572 and U2106213), the Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation (grant no. ZR2020MF121), Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation Youth Project (grant no. ZR2021QF047), Taishan Scholars Program of Shandong Province (grant no. tsqn201909051) and the USDA Hatch Program (grant no. MAS 00616).
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X.S., T.M., X.H. and H.S. contributed equally to this work. Conceptualization: H.Z., J.M., J.Z. and B.X.; methodology: X.S., X.H., T.M., H.S. and K.J.; investigation: X.S., X.H., T.M. and H.S.; visualization: X.S., X.H., T.M., H.S. and R.L.; supervision: X.S., J.Z. and B.X.; writing—original draft: X.S., T.M. and H.S.; writing—review and editing: J.Z. and B.X.
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Nature Water thanks Jingjing Du, Liwu Zhang and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Supplementary Information
Supplementary Figs. 1–20, Videos 1–6 and Tables 1–6.
Supplementary Video 1
Rapid manipulation of PS nanoplastics by a GNS (80 μm) with the assistance of the fluid drag force.
Supplementary Video 2
The specific process for the precise manipulation of nanoplastics.
Supplementary Video 3
Capturing a PS nanofibre from a nanoplastics mixture.
Supplementary Video 4
Re-suspension of enriched nanoplastics into the fluid when the laser was turned off.
Supplementary Video 5
The enrichment of nanoplastics from the river water sampled from Licun River (Qingdao, China).
Supplementary Video 6
The flow of nanoplastics through the microchannel.
Supplementary Data 1
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Shi, X., Mao, T., Huang, X. et al. Capturing, enriching and detecting nanoplastics in water based on optical manipulation, surface-enhanced Raman scattering and microfluidics. Nat Water 3, 449–460 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-025-00417-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-025-00417-8
