Plastic is synthetic or semi-synthetic material that is used to make various items. A lot of us probably could not imagine life without plastic, because it is everywhere in our households. The reason why it is so commonly used, it's because plastic is lightweight, durable and inexpensive to make. During 70 years period worldwide plastic production grew enormously – in the 1950s around 1.7 million tons of plastics per year were produced, in 2021 the number increased to 390.7 million tons. And numbers are still growing. Plastics remain in the environment for hundreds of years and degrade into microparticles ($<$ 5000 nm in diameter), and further into nanoparticles ($<$ 100 nm in diameter). It is known that nanoparticles can penetrate organisms through pinocytosis, phagocytosis or passive transport [1].
Since nanoparticles enter living organisms and accumulate in the food chain, it is important to investigate their potentially harmful effects on those organisms. Our research purpose is to determine whether polystyrene nanoparticles have a genotoxic effect on Allium cepa (common onion) at DNA level.
We have been growing onions in suspensions with polystyrene nanoparticles of various concentrations. The nanoparticles were from 50 to 100 nm in size. DNA was extracted from onion roots. For DNA purification we used Thermofisher GeneJet Plant Genomic DNA Purification Mini Kit. For this research, the ISSR-PCR method was used to evaluate whether polystyrene nanoparticles induce polymorphisms in onion DNA.
In conclusion, we observed the genotoxic effects of various concentrations of polystyrene nanoparticle suspensions in Allium cepa (common onion) root cells.