Chemical disinfection of drinking water and wastewater effluents achieves great success in eliminating pathogenic organisms. But meanwhile, a chemical disinfectant may react with organic matter and bromide and iodide ions in water to generate halogenated disinfection byproducts (halo-DBPs), which are a group of emerging micropollutants of great public concern. Triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (tqMS) coupled with liquid chromatography (LC) has been increasingly used in detection, identification and quantification of polar halo-DBPs. Since tqMS is known to have a unit <i>m/z</i> resolution (i.e., low resolution), whole number <i>m/z</i> values of molecular and fragment ions of halo-DBPs are usually set in LC-tqMS analyses, including selective ion recording, multiple reaction monitoring (MRM), precursor ion scan and product ion scan. In this study, considering the relatively large mass defect of a halogen atom (i.e., the difference between a halogen atom’s accurate and whole number masses), we examined the analyses of 30 polar halo-DBPs by setting the accurate masses, instead of the whole number masses, with LC-tqMS. The results showed that setting the accurate mass of the molecular ion of a halo-DBP substantially improved the sensitivity of the tqMS analyses. This study provided a simple and effective way to improve the sensitivity of the low-resolution tqMS in analyzing halo-DBPs, especially bromo- and iodo-DBPs.

Highly sensitive detection of halogenated disinfection by-products with low resolution triple quadrupole mass spectrometry

ACS Spring 2022

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