Towards Nano- and Microplastic sensors: Identification of Nano- and Micro plastic particles via Artificial Intelligence combined with a Plasmonic probe functionalized with an Estrogen Receptor

Nano- and microplastic particles are a global and emerging environmental issue. The present work exploits artificial intelligence (AI) to identify nano- and microplastics in water by monitoring the interaction of the sample with a sensitive surface. An Estrogen Receptor (ER) was grafted onto a gold surface1, realising a plastic optical fiber (POF) platform in order to excite a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) phenomenon. The ER-SPR-POF interface offers output data useful for exploiting a machine learning-based approach to achieve nano- and microplastic particle sensors. This work developed a proof of concept sensor through a training phase carried out by different particles in terms of materials and size. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed “smart” ER-SPR-POF interface combined with AI can be used to identify the kind of particles in terms of materials (polystyrene; polymethylmethacrylate) and size (20 μm; 100 nm) with an accuracy of 90.3%