Congratulations to Dr. Laura Zoutendijk on a successful PhD defense, during which she defended her PhD thesis, supervised by Prof. Bert Weckhuysen and Dr. Florian Meirer.

In her PhD thesis, Laura developed micro-spectroscopic protocols and tools to detect and quantify micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) in maternal and fetal tissues, a critical step toward understanding the exposure of unborn children to plastic pollution.

A central contribution was the development of a tissue digestion protocol using Proteinase K in TRIS-HCl buffer, enabling accurate detection of fluorescently labeled polystyrene MNPs in placental tissue with recovery rates of up to 98% for 200 nm particles. Laura also established linear fluorescence intensity ranges for confocal fluorescence microscopy (CFM), making it a practically applicable tool for nanoplastic quantification while simultaneously yielding morphological and particle number information.

Further work using placental perfusion showed that polystyrene particles are largely retained in placental tissue rather than transferred to the fetal compartment, with smaller particles showing greater retention. Finally, Laura developed an infrared microspectroscopic method to analyze microplastics in household dust, a relevant matrix for assessing maternal MNP exposure, and identified polyamide as one of the plastic types present.

Laura’s full thesis can be read here.