Analytical Separation Methods for Characterization of Environmental and Food Molecular Markers

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This research program aims to develop novel and enhanced analytical methods for detecting chemical markers to identify contaminants from environmental, industrial and food sources. An essential part of the study will be to develop techniques for enhancing the sensitivity and sample throughput for the detection of the chemical markers. The proposed study thus would investigate the suitability of constituents of environmental and industrial effluents as chemical markers for fingerprinting sources and extent of pollution. This would be significant in settling questions of environmental impact and legal liability. Industries such as mining, oil and gas, and forestry, and their operations produce a variety of pollutants that persist in the environment and contaminate food. This research program would target chemical constituents, such as endocrine disruptors, piscicides, hormones, and sterols present in environmental water bodies (lakes, surface waters, wastewaters, rivers, ponds) which are increasingly being used as indicators of environmental behaviour such as accumulation and contamination. The study will also investigate indicator compounds which contaminate transformer fluids used in power utility companies as the transformer ages in service. These indicator compounds tend to cause transformer faults resulting in significant cost-implications for the power supplier and, in extreme cases, explosion with a consequent threat of severe injury or death. Enhanced and sensitive separation methods will also be developed for choline chloride used as clay stabilizers in the oil and gas industry and polysulfides which impact corrosion in the oil and gas industry. Food markers are identifiers used to trace quality and safety of foodstuffs during their production or consumption. Focus will be placed on food products from the agricultural and dairy industries with the goal of developing markers that can be used to trace sources of contamination from these industries. The goal is to use fatty acids and oligosaccharides to differentiate and identify quality of dairy products and to use whey proteins to identify source of whey pollution in the dairy industry. Overall, this research program would focus on developing enhanced separation methods, primarily capillary electrophoresis (CE) and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC/MS), for the characterization of chemical constituents that can be used as tracers or indicators for environmental contamination, food authenticity, and pollution from agricultural industries.