Screening of environmental contaminants in bees and hive matrices using a high resolution-mass spectrometry based approach

5^th International Conference on Environmental Toxicology and Ecological Risk Assessment

September 12-13, 2016 Phoenix, USA

Maria Dolores Hernando Guil, Maria del Mar Gomez and Ana Isabel Garcia-Valcarcel

National Institute for Agricultural and Food Research and Technology, Spain
European Union Reference Laboratory for Pesticide Residues, Spain
University of Almeria, Spain

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Environ Anal Toxicol

Abstract :

Widespread in the environment of POPs (persistent organic pollutants) is a combination of resistance to breakdown reactions, lipophilicity, propensity to accumulate as well as tendency to enter the gas phase under environmental temperatures and susceptible to long-range transport and deposition. Most volatile and lipophilic contaminants may be deposited onto vegetation surfaces or blended with plant parts rich in lipids, for instance, pollen grains. Detection of environmental contaminants is extremely challenging, because of the large and continually increasing number of chemicals, but fundamentally due to the need for developing screening strategies for monitoring contaminants. A limitation of gas chromatography �mass spectrometry (GC-MS) based methods for target monitoring of chemicals is that several other key environmental contaminants are out of reach. Residues of veterinary treatments applied in apiculture and other pesticide residues are typically analyzed using multiplexed methods involving gas or liquid chromatography coupled to triple-quadrupole (QqQ) mass spectrometers operated in the multiple reaction monitoring mode (MRM). The benefits of high resolution mass spectrometry systems in screening capabilities, enabling retrospective analyses for the detection of non-preselected molecules, has been rarely explored in relation to monitoring of apiaries. The analytical approach presented in this study, by using gas chromatography full spectra acquisition by high resolution time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC-TOF-MS), is primarily intended to be used for characterization the organic pollution pattern, when no prior information is available, and especially for lipophilic matrices such as bee wax comb suspected to be contaminated with GC amenable environmental contaminants.

Biography :

Email: hernando.dolores@inia.es