Uptake and accumulation of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances in plants

Uptake of perfluorinated alkyl acids by crops: results from a field study

“…Current knowledge of plant uptake of PFAAs has been summarized in several recent reviews. [24][25][26] In early research on this subject, Stahl et al 20 and Lechner et al 27 showed that the concentration of PFOA and PFOS in the vegetative parts of several crops was linearly proportional to the concentration in the soil they were grown in. Yoo et al found that the foliage/soil concentration factors of C6-C14 peruoroalkyl carboxylic acids (PFCAs) in grass decreased logarithmically with increasing chain length, while the foliage/soil pore water concentration factors increased with chain length.…”

Endocrine disruption by PFAS: A major concern associated with legacy and replacement substances

“…This bond confers very high resistance over a wide range of thermal, chemical and environmental conditions and its amphipathic nature imparts additional properties as surfactants. The chemical properties of PFAS are also responsible for their resistance to biotic or abiotic degradation and long-range transport potential across different environmental media, leading to environmental persistence, increased entrance into the food chain and the bioaccumulation into living organisms (5,(30)(31)(32). From a historical perspective, PFAS have been manufactured since the late 1940s, but the first studies assessing their effects on exposed human beings (33,34) and their occurrence in the environmental media worldwide (35-37) lagged behind for many years.…”

“…By virtue of their unique chemical structure, conferring exceptional thermal and chemical stability in addition to water repellence and tensioactive properties, PFAS have been used in a variety of industrial processes and consumer products including firefighting foams, textiles, anti-adherent coatings, food packaging, cosmetics and paints (4). Once released into the environment, these substances are recalcitrant to degradation processes, can migrate towards distant sites and tend to bioaccumulate into living organisms, ultimately entering into the food webs of different ecosystems (5,6). While many efforts have been made to define the toxicological effects of PFAS on susceptible human subpopulations, our knowledge is still limited to few individual substances such as perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), which, despite having been phased out by the major producers, are still largely present in the environmental media across the globe (1,7).…”

Investigation of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in soils and sewage sludges by fluorine K-edge XANES spectroscopy and combustion ion chromatography

“…Since the number of PFAS alternatives is also relative to advancing progress of the regulatory enforcement, different future analytical approaches are inevitable. First reported by Miyake et al in 2007(Miyake et al 2007, fluorine sum parameters like adsorbable organic fluorine (AOF), extractable organic fluorine (EOF), and total fluorine (TF) can be applied to survey and detect the presence of large amounts of unidentified organofluorine compounds in environmental matrices like water sources (Wagner et al 2013;Willach et al 2016;von Abercron et al 2019;Gehrenkemper et al 2021), biota (Koch et al 2019;Spaan et al 2020;Wang et al 2020), or soils (Wang et al 2013;Yeung et al 2013;Tan et al 2014), yielding a much more comprehensive image. More than a decade later, fluorine sum parameters have been established as a useful supplement to classic target analytical approaches of PFAS (Nakayama et al 2019) and were implemented for the first time as a sum value "PFAS-total" in the recently revised Drinking Water Directive (2020/2184) by the European Commission.…”