Session Title: HR-MS Analysis of Metabolites and Transformation products of Organic Pollutants-What Remains Unknown (4th May 2023)
Chair 1. Nicola Montemurro; IDAEA-CSIC- Chair 2. Maria Vittoria Barbieri; University of Montpellier
- Chair 3. Serge Chiron; University of Montpellier
- Chair 4. Sandra Pérez; IDAEA-CSIC
Abstract:
Although most of the chemicals produced and used every day have become an integral part of our culture and society, it is necessary to identify in due time the fraction that can accumulate in humans and cause harmful effects when released into the environment. Indeed, surface water may contain thousands of these anthropogenic chemicals which can even reach the soil and infiltrate groundwater. Once released in the environment, these organic pollutants can be distributed in different compartments therefore it is essential to determine their presence. They also be subjected to degradation through natural abiotic processes (chemical and photochemical) and/or biotic processes mediated by microbial, plants, or biota. Transformations may also occur in engineered systems. As a result, new structurally related transformation products (TPs) and metabolites (METs) can be formed. TPs are mainly formed through cleavage, conjugation, alkylation/dealkylation hydrolysis, hydroxylation and oxidation/reduction reactions. In comparison to their parent compounds, some TPs are known to be more abundant in the aquatic environment than their parent compounds and they present different physico-chemical properties and therefore can behave differently in the environment being less persistent in the aquatic environment as well as more polar and thereby less bioaccumulative. Currently, the scarcity of sensitive multi-residue analytical methods represents the bottleneck to the comprehensive screening of organic pollutants and their METs/TPs. However, due to the lack of commercially available standards for the detection and quantification of METs/TPs, high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) is the most versatile technique to better understand the fate of organic pollutants in the environment. Indeed, HRMS systems have facilitated greater reliability in screening applications, providing structural information for every possible analyte and resulting a useful tool for the identification of unknown or unexpected compounds in complex matrices.
The proposed session is open to contributions addressing one of the following topics: 1) development of novel analytical methods for the analysis of organic pollutants and their METs/TPs; 2) suspect/non-target screening of METs/TPs in the environment, plants, biota and in engineered systems; 3) Semi/quantification of organic pollutants and their METs/TPs without standards with HRMS.
