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Abstract
Many substances of forensic interest are chiral and available either as racemates or pure enantiomers. Application of chiral analysis in biological samples can be useful for the determination of legal or illicit drugs consumption or interpretation of unexpected toxicological effects. Chiral substances can also be found in environmental samples and revealed to be useful for determination of community drug usage (sewage epidemiology), identification of illicit drug manufacturing locations, illegal discharge of sewage and in environmental risk assessment. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the application of chiral analysis in biological and environmental samples and their relevance in the forensic field. Most frequently analytical methods used to quantify the enantiomers are liquid and gas chromatography using both indirect, with enantiomerically pure derivatizing reagents, and direct methods recurring to chiral stationary phases.
Highlights
Chiral compounds are asymmetric three dimensional molecules with one or more stereogenic centers or asymmetry originated by planes or axis that gives two non-superimposable mirror images molecules, called enantiomers [1]
The separation of enantiomers is currently carried out using liquid chromatography (LC), gas chromatography (GC), capillary electrophoresis (CE) and supercritical fluids chromatography [15, 20,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44]
The greater rate of sulfate conjugation of R-SBT might lead to lower plasma levels of R- than S-enantiomer in human subjects, which can be responsible for increasing the adverse effects related with the latter [112,113]
Summary
Chiral compounds are asymmetric three dimensional molecules with one or more stereogenic centers or asymmetry originated by planes or axis that gives two non-superimposable mirror images molecules, called enantiomers [1]. Information about environmental occurrence and distribution of chiral pharmaceuticals in the environment is important for evaluation of enantio-(eco)toxicity in particular for aquatic organisms [27,28,29] In this sense, chiral analysis applied to drugs preparations, biological fluids and environmental samples may give information about: distinction between legal and illicit drugs; linking between samples, illegal laboratories, consumers and trafickers; estimation of consumption patterns at community level (sewage epidemiology); identification of manufacturing locations of illicit drugs; illegal discharge of sewage and information about ecotoxicity (Figure 1). The references search were based in ScienceDirect and ISI Web of Knowledge databases considering articles up to 2017 that comprise biological matrices such as urine, plasma, serum, blood and hair and environmental samples as surface waters, influents and effluents from WWTPs as aquatic environmental matrices
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