Biocalcification Induces the Preferential Settling of Small Buoyant Microplastics in Freshwater
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The vertical transport of microplastics (MPs) in freshwater is poorly understood. In this study, the effects of biocalcification on the settling behavior of buoyant MPs in the presence of Microcystis aeruginosa and Ca 2+ were investigated via incubation experiments. Here, we show that the formation of biogenic calcite on the surface of MPs resulted in an increase in density and, subsequently, the settling of MPs, with its effect varying significantly with the size and aging of MPs. Specifically, biogenic calcite preferentially facilitated the sinking of smaller MPs compared to larger ones, mainly due to their different adsorption affinities for extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), which provide nucleation sites for calcite. Notably, aging further enhanced this size-dependent settling of MPs, which was primarily attributable to differences in the selective binding of macromolecules in EPS. Compared to the pristine MPs, the aged ones tend to acquire more polar macromolecules from EPS, which resulted in greater complexation interactions between the MPs and Ca 2+ and consequently increased biogenic calcite precipitation and enhanced settling of MPs. The findings of this study highlight the importance of biogenic calcite-mediated settling of MPs in freshwater environments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".