Microplastic towers and the experiment itself
Sam m -
Good Wednesday everyone! Today’s blog post will be about the experiment itself and the growing setup.
As I talked about before in my first post, my project is focusing on the effects of polyethylene microplastics on spearmint. I’m using these vertical grow towers for the experiment. In total, there are four beds with 8 seeds each. Of course, one tower is for the microplastic treatment group, and the other is the control group. As with any good experiment, both will be receiving the same amount of water, grow light time, and overall be under the same conditions. Over time, I will track all the plants height, width, and times of phenological events as I discussed in previous posts.
This experimental model is based off of a study by Gentili et al. (citation available below). Their experiment examined the effects of PVC microplastics on two common weeds at a 1:100 ratio. Ultimately, my experiment is based off of this study, and is using the same measurement techniques as they do. The most notable difference is that my grow setup in indoors and therefore required artificial grow lights. Of course, I’m also examining a different plant then they did, as well as studying a different polymer type!
At the end of their experiment, they found that PVC microplastics were negatively impacting plant growth as well as photosynthetic efficiency and plant phenology. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that all microplastics have this effect on all plants. There are numerous pathways and mechanisms by which plastics impact plants, which I discussed a few posts ago.
Anyway, that is all for this blog post, thanks for reading!
Gentili, R., Quaglini, L., Cardarelli, E., Caronni, S., Montagnani, C., & Citterio, S. (2022). Toxic Impact of Soil Microplastics (PVC) on Two Weeds: Changes in Growth, Phenology and Photosynthesis Efficiency. Agronomy, 12(5), 1219. https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy12051219
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