Development of techniques for analysis of polar water-borne contaminants

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Fresh water represents one of the most important natural resources we have at our disposal and ensuring its quality is a major challenge. Although great strides have been made to improve the quality of the environment through controls on emissions of toxic chemicals, it has been found that adulteration of our water resources is continuing and, likely, worsening. The sources of contamination are wide-ranging, with inputs from industrial effluent, domestic wastewater (contaminated with, for example, excreted pharmaceuticals and byproducts of disinfection for pathogens), agricultural and urban run-off, and atmospheric fall-out. The contaminants themselves are quite diverse, including toxic metals, inorganic anions, organohalogens, numerous and varied polar organic compounds, etc. The polar analytes are a particular challenge with respect to chemical analysis as they are not typically amenable to analysis by the usual approaches. Development of sensitive methods to detect and quantify these water-borne compounds while providing a means for rapid screening of numerous samples is required to help mitigate input of toxic compounds to surface water.In this work, the central theme will be the development of fast and sensitive methods for analysis of polar water-borne contaminants using two instruments: a capillary electrophoresis system and a matrix assisted laser desorption ionization mass spectrometer. Although our work explicitly focuses on environmental contaminants, the methods developed for the analysis of pharmaceuticals could find application in forensics, clinical analysis and the pharmaceutical industry. Furthermore, our approach will advance "green" analytical methods that consume and generate lower levels of hazardous solvent, while maintaining standards for sensitive and robust analyses.