The availability of safe freshwater is diminishing at an alarming rate globally.  Increasing human population is stressing water supplies and contributing to water pollution.  Urban density increase coupled with climate change, including epic droughts in certain parts of the world and catastrophic flooding in others, have led to contamination of once pristine waters and the subsequent utilization of non-conventional water resources for drinking.  Moreover, historically pristine water bodies are increasingly compromised by �upstream� agricultural and urban influences.  Indeed, modern instrumental technologies for ultra-trace environmental analyses have rapidly become more sensitive, selective, efficient, and simultaneously less expensive.  A wide-range of indicator and surrogate measurements have been developed to gage the occurrence of emerging contaminants such as pharmaceuticals and endocrine disruptor compounds. In addition, bioanalytical tools are available that provide potential health relevance information beyond simple occurrence data from instrumental analyses. This presentation will focus on the application of novel methods for rapidly measuring a targeted suite of pharmaceuticals and endocrine disrupting compounds that are representative of larger classes of these chemicals. The presentation also will provide occurrence data from several large-scale monitoring studies in the US and India using these methods. The use of biological assays, particularly for glucocorticoid receptor activity, will be shared along with the corresponding bioactivity balance from targeted analyses. Lastly, the presentation will include a brief introduction and preliminary data on the use of GC and LC-QTOF for unknown characterization and pattern recognition for emerging contaminants in water. This presentation will demonstrate that targeted analyses for indicator pharmaceuticals and endocrine disrupting chemicals can be accomplished with sample volumes of less than 1 mL yet with sensitivity in ng/L concentrations in water. The presentation also will show the power of bioanalytical characterization of complex mixtures along with high-resolution MS for identification of those chemicals inducing bioactivity in water.

Monitoring for pharmaceuticals and EDCs using advanced analytical and bioanalytical tools

248th National Meeting (2014)

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