Analysis of Trace Levels of Sulfonamide and Tetracycline Antimicrobials in Groundwater and Surface Water Using Solid-Phase Extraction and Liquid Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry

Abstract

A method has been developed for the trace analysis of two classes of antimicrobials consisting of six sulfonamides (SAs) and five tetracyclines (TCs), which commonly are used for veterinary purposes and agricultural feed additives and are suspected to leach into ground and surface water. The method used solid-phase extraction and liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) with positive ion electrospray. The unique combination of a metal chelation agent (Na2EDTA) with a macroporous copolymer resulted in quantitative recoveries by solid-phase extraction (mean recovery, 98 +/- 12%) at submicrogramper-liter concentrations. An ammonium formate/formic acid buffer with a methanol/water gradient was used to separate the antimicrobials and to optimize the signal intensity. Mass spectral fragmentation and ionization characteristics were determined for each class of compounds for unequivocal identification. For all SAs, a characteristic m/z 156 ion representing the sulfanilyl fragment was identified. TCs exhibited neutral losses of 17 amu resulting from the loss of ammonia and 35 amu from the subsequent loss of water. Unusual matrix effects were seen only for TCs in this first survey of groundwater and surface water samples from sites around the United States, requiring that TCs be quantitated using the method of standard additions.

Emerging organic contaminants in groundwater: A review of sources, fate and occurrence

“…This term is used to cover not only newly developed compounds but also compounds newly discovered in the environment -often due to analytical developments (Lindsey et al, 2001;Petrovic and Barceló, 2006;Richardson and Ternes, 2011) and compounds that have only recently been categorised as contaminants. EOCs include a wide array of different compounds (as well as metabolites and transformation products-collectively referred to here as degradates)…”

Impact of reclaimed water irrigation on antibiotic resistance in public parks, Beijing, China

“…However, most antibiotics are poorly absorbed in both animals and humans, and a large proportion of antibiotics can be excreted in an unaltered state (Kumar et al, 2005) and then dispersed into environment. Indeed, antibiotics have been detected in municipal sewage , hospital wastewater (Lindberg et al, 2004), surface water Stoll et al, 2012), groundwater (Lindsey et al, 2001), as well as in soil, sediment and sludge samples (Kim and Carlson, 2007). Residual antibiotics may exert selection pressure on environmental microorganisms, contributing to proliferating antibiotic resistance in microorganisms (Martinez, 2009).…”

Rapid detection of multiple class pharmaceuticals in both municipal wastewater and sludge with ultra high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry

“…Most published methods have confirmed that the Oasis HLB cartridge is the most effective adsorbent with a robust recovery and good reproducibility for the analysis of various therapeutic pharmaceuticals in environmental matrices (Lindsey et al, 2001;Göbel et al, 2004;Ye et al, 2007;Chen et al, 2011); this arises from its chemical composition, which contains both lipophilic divinylbenzene units and hydrophilic N-vinylpyrrolidone units. Therefore, in this study, the Oasis HLB cartridge was also adopted for the extraction of multiple-class pharmaceuticals from aqueous samples.…”

“…The continuous input of these pharmaceuticals has caused their persistence in the environment. So far, various classes of pharmaceuticals have been ubiquitously detected in wastewater, surface water, ground water, and even drinking water (Lindsey et al, 2001;Göbel et al, 2004;Ye et al, 2007;Wang et al, 2011), and in soils, sediments, and biosolids as well (Yang et al, 2010;Chen et al, 2011;Ding et al, 2011).…”