Rapid Screening of 34 Emerging Contaminants in Surface Water by UHPLC-Q-TOF-MS.

Objectives: To establish a rapid screening method for 34 emerging contaminants in surface water by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-quadrupole-time of flight mass spectrometry (UHPLC-Q-TOF-MS).

Methods: The pretreatment conditions of solid phase extraction (SPE) were optimized by orthogonal experimental design and the surface water samples were concentrated and extracted by Oasis^® HLB and Oasis^® MCX SPE columns in series. The extracts were separated by Kinetex^® EVO C18 column, with gradient elution of 0.1% formic acid aqueous solution and 0.1% formic acid methanol solution. Q-TOF-MS 'fullscan' and 'targeted MS/MS' modes were used to detect 34 emerging contaminants and to establish a database with 34 emerging contaminants precursor ion, product ion and retention times.

Results: The 34 emerging contaminants exhibited good linearity in the concentration range respectively and the correlation coefficients (r) were higher than 0.97. The limit of detection was 0.2-10 ng/L and the recoveries were 81.2%-119.2%. The intra-day precision was 0.78%-18.70%. The method was applied to analyze multiple surface water samples and 6 emerging contaminants were detected, with a concentration range of 1.93-157.71 ng/L.

Conclusions: The method is simple and rapid for screening various emerging contaminants at the trace level in surface water.