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. 2026 Oct 14;658(8136):650–657. doi: 10.1038/s41586-026-11141-y

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© The Author(s) 2026

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

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Extended Data Fig. 2 — a, A diagram illustrating different surface electrostatics of carboxylic acid functionalized PS microplastics in different solvent environments. b, Zeta potential of carboxylic acid functionalized PS microplastics in 1 mM NaCl containing 0%, 0.001%, 0.01% or 0.1% Triton X-100 (n = 5 independent measurements per concentration). c, Zeta potential of carboxylic acid functionalized PS microplastics in water (n = 10 independent measurements) and ethanol (n = 4 independent measurements). Bars show the mean ± s.d. d-f. Fluorescence imaging of Rh800 localized on the surface of carboxylic acid functionalized PS microplastics (d) in water, (e) with Triton X-100, and (f) in ethanol environment. The negative surface charge of PS microplastics arising from oxygen-containing functional groups, such as carboxylic acids, shows distinct insensitivity to solvent conditions compared to the negative charges originating from water-hydrophobe interactions.