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Artificial sweeteners are food additives employed as sugar substitutes which are now considered to be emerging organic contaminants. In the present study, a method is developed for the determination of a group of artificial sweeteners in environmental waters. Considering the polar and hydrophilic character of these compounds, hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography is proposed for their separation as an alternative to traditional reversed-phase liquid chromatography. Two stationary phases with different chemistry were compared for this purpose. For the detection of the analytes, high-resolution mass spectrometry (Orbitrap) was employed to take advantage of its benefits in terms of reliable quantification and confirmation for the measurement of accurate masses. Solid-phase extraction was chosen as the sample treatment, in which the extract in a mixture of NH4OH:MeOH:ACN (1:4:15) was directly injected into the chromatographic system, simplifying the analytical procedure. The optimized method was validated on river and waste water samples. For example, in the case of effluent water samples, limits of detection ranged from 0.002 to 0.7 μg/L and limits of quantification ranged from 0.004 to 1.5 μg/L. Apparent (whole method) recoveries ranged from 57 to 74% with intra-day precision (%RSD, n = 5) ranging from 6 to 25%. The method was successfully applied to water samples from different rivers in Catalonia and different waste water treatment plants in Tarragona. Acesulfame, cyclamate, saccharine and sucralose were found in several samples.

The aim of the present study is to broaden the applications of mixed-mode ion-exchange solid-phase extraction sorbents to extract both basic and acidic compounds simultaneously by combining the sorbents in a single cartridge and developing a simplified extraction procedure. Four different cartridges containing negative and positive charges in the same configuration were evaluated and compared to extract a group of basic, neutral, and acidic pharmaceuticals selected as model compounds. After a thorough optimization of the extraction conditions, the four different cartridges showed to be capable of retaining basic and acidic pharmaceuticals simultaneously through ionic interactions, allowing the introduction of a washing step with 15 mL methanol to eliminate interferences retained by hydrophobic interactions. Using the best combined cartridge, a method was developed, validated, and further applied to environmental waters to demonstrate that the method is promising for the extraction of basic and acidic compounds from very complex samples.

Iodinated X-ray contrast media are the most widely used pharmaceuticals for intravascular administration in X-ray diagnostic procedures. The increasing concern of the fate of these compounds into the environment has led to the development of analytical methods to determine them. However, these methods present problems due to the polar character of these analytes. In this paper, hydrophilic interaction LC is presented as an alternative technique. The retention of iodinated X-ray contrast media was studied in two bare silica phases with different particle designs (i.e. porous and Fused Core™) and a zwitterionic sulfoalkylbetaine phase. The effect of the most important parameters of the mobile phase was studied for each stationary phase. It was observed that optimal mobile phase conditions included buffers with a high buffering capacity. Additionally, the retention mechanisms involved were studied in order to provide some insight into the possible occurring interactions. The contributions of partition and adsorption and the effect of the temperature on the retention of analytes were evaluated on all of the stationary phases.

Solid-phase extraction (SPE) is a widely-used and very well-established sample preparation technique for liquid samples. An area of on-going focus for innovation in this field concerns the development of new and improved SPE sorbents that can enhance the sensitivity and/or the selectivity of SPE processes. In this context, mixed-mode ionexchange sorbents have been developed and commercialised, thereby allowing enhanced capacity and selectivity to be offered by one single material. The ion-selectivity of these materials is such that either anion-exchange or cation-exchange is possible, however one limitation to their use is that more than one sorbent type is required to capture both anions and cations. In this paper, we disclose the design, synthesis and exploitation of a novel SPE sorbent based on microporous polymer microspheres with amphoteric character. We show that it is possible to switch the ion-exchange retention mechanism of the sorbent simply by changing the pH of the loading solution; anion-exchange dominates at low pH, cation-exchange dominates at high pH, and both mechanisms can contribute to retention when the polymer-bound amphoteric species, which are based on the α-amino acid sarcosine (N-methylglycine), are in a zwitterionic state. This is an interesting and useful feature, since it allows distinctly different groups of analytes (acids and bases) to be fractionated using one single amphoteric sorbent with dual-functionality. The sarcosinebased sorbent was applied to the SPE of acidic, basic and amphoteric analytes from ultrapure water, river water and effluent wastewater samples. Under optimised conditions (loading 100 mL of sample at pH 6, washing with 1 mL of MeOH and eluting with an acidic or basic additive in MeOH) the recoveries for most of the compounds were from 57% to 87% for river water and from 61% to 88% for effluent wastewater. We anticipate that these results will lay the basis for the development of a new family of multifunctional sorbents, where two or more separation mechanisms can be embedded within one single, bespoke material optimised for application to challenging chemical separations to give significant selectivity advantages over essentially all other state-of-the-art SPE sorbents.