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Water

Chemistry In Pictures

Chemistry in Pictures: Please wash your water bottle

by Brianna Barbu
June 25, 2024
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Most Popular in Environment

A microscope image of microbes living inside a plastic water bottle.
Credit: Simona Pînzaru/Lucian Barbu-Tudoran


Reusable water bottles keep a lot of trash out of landfills, but if you don’t clean them regularly, their damp interiors can become a haven for microbes. Case in point: this is a microscope image of the inside of a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) water bottle that’s been sitting around in a lab for a year. Those white blobs are Microcystis aeruginosa, the most common species of toxic freshwater cyanobacteria. Simona Pînzaru, a researcher at Babeş-Bolyai University in Romania, captured the image while collecting data on aging plastics for the university’s plastics Raman database. She found that the used bottle showed strong carotenoid signals in spectroscopic analysis, signaling the presence of photosynthetic microorganisms living on the interior walls of the bottle.

Submitted by Simona Pînzaru

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Chemical & Engineering News
ISSN 0009-2347
Copyright © 2024 American Chemical Society

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