Front Cover Story (See: Juan Liu, Guanjun Xu, Xuejun Ruan, Kejian Li, Liwu Zhang, 2022, 16(11): 143)
Microplastics have been widely found in the environment and considered to be a new pollutant. Besides, microplastics are constantly degraded in the environment and then form smaller microplastics and even nanoplastics, which may pose greater potential risks. However, the difficulty in detection of smaller microplastics also increases greatly. Therefore, we developed a SERS substrate based on an anodic aluminium oxide (AAO) template with a special V-shaped nanopore array. The V-shaped AAO template was deposited Au nanoparticles (AuNPs) by magnetron sputtering or ion sputtering, and then AuNPs@V-shaped AAO SERS substrate was evaluated through the detection of polystyrene and polymethyl methacrylate microspheres. Results indicated that individual polystyrene sphere with a diameter of 1 μm can be well detected, and the maximum enhancement factor can reach 20. In addition, ambient atmospheric samples were collected and tested to verify the effectiveness of the AuNPs@V-shaped AAO SERS substrate in the real environment. This study provides a rapid, economic and simple method for detecting and identifying microplastics with small size.
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