Glyphosate is the weed killing chemical in Roundup, one of the most commonly used weedkillers in the world. It is advertised as being able to kill weeds, but not the lawn or crops around the weeds. It is mostly used against broadleaf plants, halting their EPSP synthase and killing them within a week. After application, it will begin to decay microbially into aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA), and can possibly get into water sources via runoff as either glyphosate or as its decayed AMPA form. Glyphosate was ruled carcinogenic in the part per trillion range to individual cells on July 7, 2017, by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment2. It was also previously known to be extremely harmful to amphibians, causing major birth defects in the specimens it does not kill outright at concentrations of 3.7 ppm. A method for the analysis of stream and river water for traces of glyphosate and AMPA was established using Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry following a derivatization process with fluorenylmethyloxycarbonyl chloride (FMOC-Cl). Samples of water for testing were collected from 5 sites in Clark County, OH, within 5 days of a rainfall. Dates collected ranged from May 25th to July 12th. The sites were North Fork Little Miami River, Goose Creek, water from the land owned by Conrad Balliet, (a retired Wittenberg professor), Clifton Reserve, and Ellis Pond. Ellis Pond was included later in the sampling in an effort to compare still water to moving systems. The main goal of the research was to create accurate standard curves for the gas chromatograph and to analyze the water samples for the amount of glyphosate and/or AMPA.

Glyphosate concentrations in river and stream water as a function of rain runoff

255th National Meeting (2018)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.