Assessment of Sucralose, Caffeine and Acetaminophen as Anthropogenic Tracers in Aquatic Systems Across Florida
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Assessment of Sucralose, Caffeine and Acetaminophen as Anthropogenic Tracers in Aquatic Systems Across Florida Autumn Henderson1 · Brian Ng1 · Steven Landeweer1 · Natalia Quinete1,2 · Piero Gardinali1,2 Received: 9 April 2020 / Accepted: 13 July 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Sucralose is one of the most popular artificial sweeteners worldwide. Due to its high stability, persistence and low removal efficiency in wastewater treatment plants, sucralose has been used as an indicator of wastewater intrusion into aquatic systems. However, its stability has also been a reason for discussion whether sucralose’s presence in surface water could indicate a recent anthropogenic input. Caffeine and acetaminophen have been considered as tracers in human impacted aquatic ecosystems and potentially good indicators of recent anthropogenic inputs into the environment due to their short half-lives in water. Here, a novel, high throughput and sensitive method based on online SPE-LC-HRMS for the determination of caffeine, sucralose and acetaminophen was developed and validated for both fresh and seawater samples and applied to environmental water samples to evaluate the efficiency of these compounds as tracers of aquatic pollution. Caffeine and sucralose were detected in > 70% of samples, while acetaminophen was only detected in 3% of samples above the MDL, demonstrating its limited environmental applicability. Keywords Anthropogenic tracers · HRMS · Surface water Sucralose (Splenda) has gained popularity worldwide as an artificial sweetener and sugar substitute in low-calorie diets, being present in a variety of foods, drinks, pharmaceuticals and personal care products. Previous studies have found that sucralose is safe for human consumption, and due to its stability, persistence in water of up to several years and inefficient removal in wastewater treatment plants, sucralose has been widely used as a tracer of human impacts in aquatic ecosystems (Batchu et al. 2015; Cejas et al. 2010; Tollefsen et al. 2012). Sucralose has been selected as a tracer due to its ubiquitous occurrence in the environment, and because the majority of sucralose ingested is not adsorbed Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00128-020-02942-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Piero Gardinali [email protected] 1
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Florida International University, 11200 SW 8th Street, Miami, FL 33199, USA
Southeast Environmental Research Center (SERC), Institute of Environment, Florida International University, 11200 SW 8th Street, Miami, FL 33199, USA
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or metabolized by humans. More recently, Schiffman and Rother found that sucralose produced multiple peaks in thin layer radiochromatographic profiles, showing the existence of at least some metabolites (Schiffman and Rother 2013). Unfortunately, the high stability of sucralose has also made it difficult to determine if its
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