Mutagenic contaminants bioaccumulation detection at ultratrace levels from complex biological matrices

Abstract

Considering ecotoxicological effects on environmental and biota of a wide range of organic pollutants a stricter and combative campaign emerged at worldwide level in terms of their use and discharge into the environment. In the last decades, only in the European Union were created a large number of restrictive regulations of such organic chemicals, regulations that extend to all environmental matrices as water – European Water Framework Directive (WFD- 2000/60/EC), marine environment – European Marine Strategy Directive (MSD-2008/56/EC), soil – European Soil Framework Directive (SFD-2004/35/EC) and for different departments as chemical safety and use or biocides use, European Regulation for Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) and Biocides Directive (Council Directive 98/8/EC), respectively. Today mutagenic pollutants as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are widely present at global scale, acting continuously on “biota’s health”. Therefore improvement of mass spectrometric detection of PAHs and their possible metabolites become an important issue in eco-toxicological fields. Once to could perform their mass spectrometric analysis optimization of PAH compounds isolation from complex biological matrixes (as vegetal, animals and human biological samples) had to be made. As isolation technique solid phase microextraction (SPME), liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) and headspace extraction- solid phase microextraction (HS-SPME) were improved obtaining the recovery factors between 72 – 118 %. Optimization of chromatographic-mass spectrometric (GC-MS) analysis procedures of these mutagenic species permitted their detection from such complex biological matrixes at very trace levels, namely between 0.06 – 0.47 ng⋅kg^-1 dry weight.