A Reliable Method for the Isolation and Characterization of Microplastics in Fish Gastrointestinal Tracts Using an Infrared Tunable Quantum Cascade Laser System

[Abstract] Societal and environmental concern due to frequent reports of microplastics in fish stomachs raised as they may accumulate along the trophic chain. The request for analysing microplastics in fish stresses two major analytical issues: sample treatment and final characterization. The, so far, workhorse for chemical characterization is infrared spectroscopy which is time-consuming. Here, a quantum cascade laser-based device is used to accelerate the characterization stage. Its novelty poses new challenges for sample processing and particle handling because the unknown particles must be transferred to a reflective slide. In this study, three sample digestion protocols (alkaline-oxidative with H2O2, and alkaline-oxidative with NaClO and enzymatic-oxidative) and three different procedures to transfer the filter cake to reflective slides are compared. A simplified enzymatic-oxidative digestion (validated through an interlaboratory exercise) combined with a Syncore® automatic evaporation system and a Laser Direct Infrared Imaging (LDIR) device is proposed first time as a reliable and relatively fast method to treat gastrointestinal tracts of fish. Analytical recoveries were studied using samples of Scomber scombrus and they were ca. 100% for big –i.e., >500 μm- and ca. 90% for medium –i.e., 200–300 μm- particles and ca. 75% for 10 μm thick fibres.This research was supported by the LAnd-Based Solutions for PLAstics in the Sea Project (LABPLAS Project), Grant Agreement No. 101003954, under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and the Integrated approach on the fate of MicroPlastics (MPs) towards healthy marine ecosystems Project (MicroplastiX project), Grant PCI2020-112145, supported by the JPI_Oceans Program and by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the European Union “Next Generation EU/PRTR”. The Program ‘Consolidación e Estructuración de Unidades de Investigación Competitivas” of the Galician Government (Xunta de Galicia) is also acknowledged (Grant ED431C 2021/56)Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2021/5

Development of a Fast and Efficient Method to Analyze Microplastics in Planktonic Samples

Financiado para publicación en acceso aberto: Universidade da Coruña/CISUG[Abstract] Microplastics (MPs) affect plankton (a basis of the trophic chain) and planktivorous fish can ingest them through food confusion or by trophic transmission. Consensus to determine MPs in plankton is lacking and, so, three digestion treatments were evaluated: Alkaline (potassium hydroxide) and enzymatic (protease plus lipase) digestions, both combined with a hydrogen peroxide stage; and an oxidative method using a surfactant (sodium dodecyl sulfate) plus hydrogen peroxide. The alkaline method using potassium hydroxide was found to damage polystyrene. MPs were identified with a stereomicroscope and characterized by reflectance infrared microscopy in semi-automatic mode (using dedicated multi-well aluminium plates). Analytical recoveries for polypropylene, polystyrene, polyethylene, polyamide, polyvinyl chloride and polyethylene terephthalate were higher than 75%, 82% and 83% for the alkaline, enzymatic and oxidative treatments, respectively. The enzymatic method was successfully validated in a European interlaboratory exercise and the oxidative method was demonstrated to be a reliable, fast and cheaper alternative.The Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación-Agencia Estatal de Investigación) and the JPI-Oceans European Program are acknowledged by the BASEMAN (PCIN-2015-170-C02-01, with FEDER/ERDF funds) and the MicroplastiX (PCIN-PCI2020-112145) projects. Thanks are given also to the Spanish Government by the CTM2016-77945-C3-3-R (ARPA-ACUA) Grant. The Galician Government (“Xunta de Galicia”) is acknowledged for its support to the QANAP group (Programa de Consolidación y Estructuración de Unidades de Investigación Competitiva. Ref. ED431C 2017/28) partially financed by FEDER/ERDF fundsXunta de Galicia; ED431C 2017/2

Efecto de la precipitación en la tenacidad criogénica en aceros inoxidables con nitrógeno

Los aceros inoxidables austeníticos JK2, JJ1 y JN1 se envejecieron isotérmicamente a temperaturas de 600 a 900 ºC por distintos tiempos, para estudiar la evolución microestructural y su efecto en la tenacidad a la fractura a temperaturas criogénicas. La energía de fractura Charpy muesca-V a 77 K muestra una significante disminución con el tiempo de envejecido en los aceros JJ1 y JN1 debido a sus altos contenidos de C y N. Las fractografias de MEB de las muestras ensayadas por CMV muestran fractura frágil cuya fracción aumenta con el tiempo y temperatura de envejecido

Aperture effects on the oxygen abundance determinations from CALIFA data

This paper aims at providing aperture corrections for emission lines in a sample of spiral galaxies from the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area Survey (CALIFA) database. In particular, we explore the behavior of the log([OIII]5007/Hbeta)/([NII]6583/Halpha) (O3N2) and log[NII]6583/Halpha (N2) flux ratios since they are closely connected to different empirical calibrations of the oxygen abundances in star forming galaxies. We compute median growth curves of Halpha, Halpha/Hbeta, O3N2 and N2 up to 2.5R_50 and 1.5 disk R_eff. The growth curves simulate the effect of observing galaxies through apertures of varying radii. The median growth curve of the Halpha/Hbeta ratio monotonically decreases from the center towards larger radii, showing for small apertures a maximum value of ~10% larger than the integrated one. The median growth curve of N2 shows a similar behavior, decreasing from the center towards larger radii. No strong dependence is seen with the inclination, morphological type and stellar mass for these growth curves. Finally, the median growth curve of O3N2 increases monotonically with radius. However, at small radii it shows systematically higher values for galaxies of earlier morphological types and for high stellar mass galaxies. Applying our aperture corrections to a sample of galaxies from the SDSS survey at 0.02<=z<=0.3 shows that the average difference between fiber-based and aperture corrected oxygen abundances, for different galaxy stellar mass and redshift ranges, reaches typically to ~11%, depending on the abundance calibration used. This average difference is found to be systematically biased, though still within the typical uncertainties of oxygen abundances derived from empirical calibrations. Caution must be exercised when using observations of galaxies for small radii (e.g. below 0.5R_eff) given the high dispersion shown around the median growth curves.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap

Oxygen and nitrogen abundances of HII regions in six spiral galaxies

Spectroscopic observations of 63 HII regions in six spiral galaxies (NGC 628, NGC 783, NGC 2336, NGC 6217, NGC 7331, and NGC 7678) were carried out with the 6-meter telescope (BTA) of Russian Special Astrophysical Observatory with the Spectral Camera attached to the focal reducer SCORPIO in the multislit mode with a dispersion of 2.1A/pixel and a spectral resolution of 10A. These observations were used to estimate the oxygen and nitrogen abundances and the electron temperatures in HII regions through the recent variant of the strong line method (NS calibration). The parameters of the radial distribution (the extrapolated central intercept value and the gradient) of the oxygen and nitrogen abundances in the disks of spiral galaxies NGC 628, NGC 783, NGC 2336, NGC 7331, and NGC 7678 have been determined. The abundances in the NGC 783, NGC 2336, NGC 6217, and NGC 7678 are measured for the first time. Galaxies from our sample follow well the general trend in the luminosity - central metallicity diagram for spiral and irregular galaxies.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRA

The O3N2 and N2 abundance indicators revisited: improved calibrations based on CALIFA and Te-based literature data

The use of IFS is since recently allowing to measure the emission line fluxes of an increasingly large number of star-forming galaxies both locally and at high redshift. The main goal of this study is to review the most widely used empirical oxygen calibrations, O3N2 and N2, by using new direct abundance measurements. We pay special attention to the expected uncertainty of these calibrations as a function of the index value or abundance derived and the presence of possible systematic offsets. This is possible thanks to the analysis of the most ambitious compilation of Te-based HII regions to date. This new dataset compiles the Te-based abundances of 603 HII regions extracted from the literature but also includes new measurements from the CALIFA survey. Besides providing new and improved empirical calibrations for the gas abundance, we also present here a comparison between our revisited calibrations with a total of 3423 additional CALIFA HII complexes with abundances derived using the ONS calibration by Pilyugin et al. (2010). The combined analysis of Te-based and ONS abundances allows us to derive their most accurate calibration to date for both the O3N2 and N2 single-ratio indicators, in terms of all statistical significance, quality and coverage of the space of parameters. In particular, we infer that these indicators show shallower abundance dependencies and statistically-significant offsets compared to those of Pettini and Pagel (2004), Nagao et al. (2006) and P\'erez-Montero and Contini (2009). The O3N2 and N2 indicators can be empirically applied to derive oxygen abundances calibrations from either direct abundance determinations with random errors of 0.18 and 0.16, respectively, or from indirect ones (but based on a large amount of data) reaching an average precision of 0.08 and 0.09 dex (random) and 0.02 and 0.08 dex (systematic; compared to the direct estimations),respectively.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Pipe3d, a pipeline to analyze integral field spectroscopy data: II Analysis sequence and califa dataproducts

Presentamos una version mejorada de FIT3D, una herramienta de ajuste para el analisis de las poblaciones estelares y el gas ionizado en espectros de galaxias de resolucion intermedia. La misma se desarrollo para el análisis de datos de espectroscopía de campo integral y es la base de Pipe3D, un dataducto usado en el analisis de datos de los muestreos CALIFA, MaNGA y SAMI. Describimos la filosof´ıa y los pasos seguidos en el ajuste, presentando un conjunto amplio de simulaciones con el fin de estimar la precisión de los parametros derivados, mostrando el resultado de dichas simulaciones. Finalmente, comparamos el resultado del analisis con FIT3D y el obtenido mediante otros paquetes de uso frecuente, encontrando que los parametros derivados son totalmente compatibles.We present Pipe3D, an analysis pipeline based on the FIT3D fitting tool, developed to explore the properties of the stellar populations and ionized gas of integral field spectroscopy (IFS) data. Pipe3D was created to provide coherent, simple to distribute, and comparable dataproducts, independently of the origin of the data, focused on the data of the most recent IFU surveys (e.g., CALIFA, MaNGA, and SAMI), and the last generation IFS instruments (e.g., MUSE). In this article we describe the di fferent steps involved in the analysis of the data, illustrating them by showing the dataproducts derived for NGC 2916, observed by CALIFA and P-MaNGA. As a practical example of the pipeline we present the complete set of dataproducts derived for the 200 datacubes that comprises the V500 setup of the CALIFA Data Release 2 (DR2), making them freely available through the network. Finally, we explore the hypothesis that the properties of the stellar populations and ionized gas of galaxies at the e ffective radius are representative of the overall average ones, finding that this is indeed the case.Fil: Sánchez, S. F.. Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Instituto de Astronomia; MéxicoFil: Pérez, E.. Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía; España. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; EspañaFil: Sanchez Blazquez, P.. Departamento de Fisica Teorica ; Facultad de Ciencias ; Universidad Autonoma de Madrid;Fil: García Benito, Rubén. Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía; España. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; EspañaFil: Ibarra Mede, H. J.. Space Telescope Science Institute; Estados UnidosFil: González, J. J.. Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Instituto de Astronomia; MéxicoFil: Rosales Ortega, F. F.. Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Optica y Electrónica ; MéxicoFil: Sánchez Menguiano, L.. Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía; España. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; EspañaFil: Ascasibar, Y.. Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. Facultad de Física. Departamento Astronomía y Meteorología; EspañaFil: Bitsakis, T.. Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Instituto de Astronomia; MéxicoFil: Law, D.. Space Telescope Science Institute; Estados UnidosFil: Cano Díaz, M.. Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Instituto de Astronomia; MéxicoFil: López Cobá, C.. Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Instituto de Astronomia; MéxicoFil: Marino, R. A.. Universidad Complutense de Madrid; EspañaFil: Gil de Paz, A.. Australian Astronomical Observatory; AustraliaFil: López Sánchez, A.. Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (iac); EspañaFil: Barrera Ballesteros, Jorge K.. Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias; EspañaFil: Galbany, Lluís. Millennium Institute Of Astrophysics; Chile. Universidad de Chile; ChileFil: Mast, Damian. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Astronomía Teórica y Experimental. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Observatorio Astronómico de Córdoba. Instituto de Astronomía Teórica y Experimental; ArgentinaFil: Abril Malgarejo, V.. Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Instituto de Astronomia; MéxicoFil: Roman Lopes, A.. Universidad de La Serena; Chil