Rapid target and non-target screening method for determination of emerging organic chemicals in fish

Abstract

An effective analytical method for target and non-target screening of multi-class emerging organic chemicals in aquaculture fish muscle samples using liquid chromatography coupled with high resolution time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC-QTOF-MS/MS) was reported. Two sample pretreatment methods (QuEChERS and Captiva EMR-Lipid cartridge) were compared and assessed for 151 organic compounds covering a wide range of log Kow (-1.37—11.51) in freeze-dried fish samples. Captiva EMR-Lipid cartridge outperformed QuEChERS by high detection frequency (> 87.5%) and effective matrix removal with satisfactory standard deviation of the compounds (< 20%), and meanwhile provided acceptable recoveries for most organic chemicals at three spiking concentration levels (10, 50, and 100 ng g−1). Spiking experiments suggested that the developed non-target screening workflow showed further convincible identification results with over 83.3% of the chemicals confirmed at even low spiking levels. A list of 867 organic chemicals were tentatively identified in fish samples collected from fish ponds with 21 of them classified as high confidence levels (L1 and L2). The results showed that the simplified analytical strategy can be applied for the quantification and screening analysis of a broad range of emerging organic chemicals in fish samples.