Abstract text (incl. figure legends and references)

Correlative light electron microscopy (CLEM) has been used for the detection of plastics pollution with plants. Entries of the ubiquitous world-wide plastics pollution into nature thus enter the human food chain as degradation products, influencing environmental habitat and health. Micro- and nanoplastics as foreign bodies contaminating beverages and foods are likely to have a long-term impact on nutrition growth, public and personal health.

Nanoparticles and their spatial location are generally difficult to detect in biological specimens, especially plastic particles due to their analogous hydrocarbon-based matrix. Reliable analysis methods for the discovery of micro- and nanoplastic particles in entities are not fully established yet.

We determined that light microscopy (LM) is usable for a coarse estimation of the contamination grade of plant samples. Light microscopy, due to its optical diffraction limit, rather detects nanoparticle patches than single particles, shown using fluorescent polymer nanoparticles. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) instead provides higher resolution, especially for single particle detection. But it requires extended EM sample staining preparation to depict hydrocarbon-based specimens.

Using both microscopy types in a CLEM approach with TESCAN CORAL, the necessary insights to the contaminated plant areas are provided with single nanoparticle resolution. It reveals that nanoparticles seem to be tightly attached to the plant material (cf. Fig. 1). It indicates further that basic food cleaning procedures might be insufficient for full particle removal. The presented approach circumvents correlative topography issues of the 3D-plant samples. CLEM provided a fast and reliable analysis method for the semiquantitative analysis & detection of micro- and nanoparticles plant contamination.

(Fig.1: Nanoplastics particles attached to the leaf surface)