Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in contaminated coastal marine waters of the Saudi Arabian Red Sea: a baseli
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in contaminated coastal marine waters of the Saudi Arabian Red Sea: a baseline study Aasim M. Ali 1 & Christopher P. Higgins 2 & Walied M. Alarif 3 & Sultan S. Al-Lihaibi 3 & Mohammed Ghandourah 3 & Roland Kallenborn 4,5 Received: 1 February 2020 / Accepted: 25 June 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) are today considered important constituents of the continuously growing substance group of persistent contaminants of emerging environmental concern (PCEC). Here, we report for the first time the concentrations of 12 relevant PFASs in 28 marine water samples from the Saudi Arabian coastal waters of the Red Sea. The sum levels of 12 PFASs (Σ12 PFAS) in surface seawater ranged from 0.99, confirming an acceptable linearity range over four orders of magnitude. Furthermore, the linear calibration curves for the internal standards applied for quantification were prepared using four dilution steps (5, 25, 50, 60 ng/mL) and applied [13C8]-PFOA as a recovery standard. Correlation coefficients for all ISTDs were found > 0.99. The relative method recovery (%) was calculated using seawater sample collected from a depth of 60 m from the Norwegian Oslofjord (south of Drøbak, Norway). Four replicates samples (1 L) were spiked with all native compounds at 50 ng/L and all ISTDs at a concentration of 25 ng/L. All spiked samples were prepared according to the sample preparation and quantification protocol for PFASs developed here for aqueous samples. HPLC-QqQ data were processed with Agilent through the MassHunter Workstation software package (Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis, Version B.07.00 /Build 7.0.457.0, 2008).
The method applied in this study was developed based on a previous study with some modifications (Yamashita et al. 2004). As demonstrated in Table 1, the analytical method proved to be well-suited for this study with respect to linearity range, compound-specific linearity (R2) equal to or higher than 0.99 for all target PFASs, sensitivity (instrument and method limits of detection (ILODs and MDL) in the lower ng/L range for all PFASs, and extraction efficiency (relative recovery (%R) higher than 74% for all compounds except PFBA (17%)). Percent relative standard deviations (% RSD) were also found to be acceptable for all PFASs except for PFBA (33.8%) with all PFASs at or below 10% indicating good repeatability. Therefore, PFBA was excluded from quantification. These recoveries with this repeatability indicate that the negative effects of matrix suppression and SPE loss on quantification have been compensated by the use of isotope dilution. These results confirmed that all target PFASs (except PFBA) can be quantified using the here applied SPE extraction method (HLB based) and HPL-ESI-QqQ quantification. It is important to mention that our QC results confirmed the conclusions by Taniyasu et al. (2005): these authors tested the recoveries of PFASs extracted with SPE using HLB cartridges. They reported recoveries of
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