Jacob de Boer
VU University, The Netherlands
Biography
The environment is contaminated with a large number of compounds that may impact organisms in, e.g., surface waters, soil, sediments and also indoors. The complexity of the contaminant mixtures demands powerful separation and identification techniques. Whereas in the last part of the previous century, many priority pollutants were non-polar, fat soluble and bioaccumulating compounds, such as dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls. The last decades showed emerging compounds of higher polarity such as many pesticides, perfluorinated compounds, personal care products and pharmaceuticals. These compounds not only or only marginally dissolve in lipids but are also found in surface waters and, consequently, threaten environmental and human health. In many cases, target analyses suffice to determine the concentrations of the aforementioned compounds. However, the increase in the number of chemicals being used has caused an ongoing flood of emerging compounds for which are no standards or which still need to be identified. Advanced detection systems such as modern mass spectrometry alone are not sufficient to elucidate the complex mixtures of chemicals present. The development of comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GCxGC) showed already to be extremely useful for the identification of emerging non- and medium-polar contaminants. Comprehensive two-dimensional liquid chromatography (LCxLC) has now shown to be extremely useful in the same way as GCxGC, but for more polar compounds. The significant enhancement of the peak capacity by using LCxLC, together with new, extensive libraries and software facilitates the rapid identification of toxic compounds, leading to a comprehensive chemical characterization of environmental water and sediment samples.