Solid Phase Extraction Gas Chromatography/Electron Capture Detector Method for the Determination of Organochlorine Pesticides in Wildlife Whole Blood

Abstract

A gas chromatographic method for the analysis of 10 organochlorine pesticides in 0.5 mL of whole blood is described. Sample preparation involved an ethyl ether and hexane extraction, followed by a silica solid phase extraction cleanup. The pesticides are quantified by gas chromatography/electron capture detection. Method limits of detection ranged from 1.1 to 5.2 µg/L. The mean and standard deviation for the recovery of 10 pesticides was 97.9 ( 5.5%. Recoveries from whole blood were comparable to recoveries from plasma. This indicates that the preparation of plasma is unnecessary for the quantification of organochlorine pesticides in blood. This approach is particularly useful as a nonlethal approach for monitoring pesticide contamination in small animals for which the volume of blood is limiting.

Detection of prenatal exposure to several classes of environmental toxicants and their metabolites by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry in maternal and umbilical cord blood

“…Most recent exposure analysis studies have focused on blood serum or plasma as the preferred matrices of interest [25,28,[31][32][33][34][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44]. However, these studies have not acknowledged that representative concentrations of highly lipophilic pesticides are more likely to be found in whole blood, and no published study to date has concomitantly analyzed maternal whole blood and cord blood.…”

Tracking pan-continental trends in environmental contamination using sentinel raptors—what types of samples should we use?

“…Advantages and disadvantages on using each compartment are summarised in Table 3 . Use of whole blood may permit collection of smaller blood volumes which can be important when sampling small raptors (Volz et al 2001 ). Most studies that have measured Pb in raptors have used whole blood (García-Fernández et al 1995 , 1997 ; Mateo et al 1999 ; Benito et al 1999 ; Pain et al 2007 ; Gangoso et al 2009 ; Espín et al 2014b , d ).…”

Organochlorine residues in blood of cinereous vultures and Eurasian griffon vultures in a northeastern Mediterranean area of nature conservation

“…The solvent mixture used for extraction (hexane/ethyl ether) was based in previous studies (Voltz et al 2001;Johnstone et al 1996). An aliquot of homogeneous blood (2 ml) was transferred to a pre-weighed container and the sample weight was determined.…”