Monitoring by LC-MS/MS of 28 endocrine disruptor compounds in surface water using passive sampling devices: comparison of POCIS and Chemcatcher

Regarding to the growth of interest concerning the presence and the identification of human made pollutants and xenobiotics in the environment, multi-residue analysis techniques and representative water sampling methods need to be developed. Some of these micro pollutants of interest are known as Endocrine Disruptor Compounds (EDCs) due to their effects on the endocrine causing behavior disorders, decreased reproduction or birth malformations for example. As those molecules display large range of physico-chemical properties, most of the current studies are focused on one or two EDCs families. This project is focused on the evaluation of the current pollution of surface water media threw the development of a multi-residue and multi-family of EDCs analysis method coupled to passive sampling devices. 28 EDCs of interest have been selected for this project among emerging contaminants listed by the European Union. This combination of different EDCs families representating agricultural, pharmaceutical and human pollution, has been chosen to be found in surface water and analysed by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). Two passive sampling devices have been selected to monitor those compounds: the Polar Organic Chemical Integrative Samplers (POCIS in Pharm configuration) and the Chemcatcher (in polar configuration). Both are still in development but already showed good efficiency to monitor some of the compounds of interest. Calibration of those systems have been realised with the Cemagref Lyon in 50L aquariums with continuous renewal of doped solutions for 28 days. Both showed good linearity for most of the compounds of interest up to 21 or 28 days but seem to have reached equilibrium after 14 days for some of the molecules. Calibration experiment has been validated by Cemagref Lyon with controled and stable temperature, conductivity and flow. Both systems showed same behaviour but calculated sampling rates were higher for the POCIS than for the Chemcatcher. The two systems have been exposed in the field for 4 weeks between june and july 2010. Experiments confirmed linearity for somme of the molecules and enable us to calculate sampling rates for some that hasn't been tested yet. Those two passive samplers combined to an optimised multi-residue analytical method allow us to monitor a representative mixture of endocrine disruptors in surface waters