Water safety and quality are fundamental to human development and well-being. Therefore, safe and readily available water is important for public health, whether it is used for drinking, domestic use, food production or recreational purposes.  Environmental regulations throughout the world currently focus on monitoring a limited number of well-known compounds that are assumed to be responsible for significant ecological and human health related risks. However, there is a continuously growing interest to extend the well-defined fraction of anthropogenic chemicals, the priority pollutants declared by the regulations, to allow the surveillance screening for contaminants of emerging concern and thus provide comprehensive data on the chemical quality of drinking and surface waters.  Contamination of environmental samples with harmful chemicals can be detected with high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS), which provides accurate mass data on the compounds found with broad range of physicochemical properties and allows retrospective analysis to look for known and newly identified contaminants in a single sample.  Targeted analytical methods are increasingly complemented by untargeted acquisition methods using high resolution accurate mass Q-TOF LC/MS due to comprehensive screening requirements in current environmental regulations as well as increasing interest in the occurrence of contaminants of emerging concern.  The determination of polar and semi-polar compounds in a single analytical run is difficult due to their inherently different physicochemical properties. It is challenging to analyze polar compound with conventional online SPE setup as they rapidly pass through the SPE cartridge, but they have successfully been used for increasing the sensitivity of an LC/MS system due to the enrichment of semi-polar compounds on the cartridge.  The aim of the current work was the development of a target and suspect screening LC/MS method using HRMS for the determination of contaminants of emerging concern with broad range of physicochemical properties in drinking water by leveraging a customized online SPE setup for polar and non-polar analytes in a single injection to ensure their high quality. The combination of direct injection of aqueous samples with high volume injection for online SPE is an attractive approach to achieve higher sensitivity and reduce the time required of the sample preparation step.

Advancing throughput for comprehensive HRMS screening of drinking water: Combined approach of online SPE and direct injection

2019 Spring National Meeting

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