SPECIALLY COLLECTED PAPERS
Shimadzu Review 75[1・2] (2018.6)
Abstract
Phthalate esters are widely used as plasticizers, but they are suspected to be endocrine disruptors and have been identified as possibly affecting human health. Since diet is the primary determiner of the presence of phthalate esters in humans, a highly accurate analysis is required. However, the degree of difficulty is known to be high. This article reports on optimization results of a pretreatment method for phthalate esters in diet and the usefulness of GC-MS/MS (MRM) with higher selectivity. When pretreating phthalate ester in diet samples defatting using hexane from acetonitrile extract is necessary. However, since more than 50 % of DEHP and DnOP is partitioned in the hexane layer, it was necessary to re-extract the hexane layer after degreasing with acetonitrile.
Moreover, by purification consisting of gel permeation chromatography (GPC) and florisil, it was possible to recover more than 80 % of seven kinds of phthalate esters. Even after passing through these purifications, there were some problems in GC-MS (SIM) measurement. For instance, unstable peaks and baseline due to residual matrix were found in the SIM measurements, but by using MRM measurements, the problems were resolved thanks to the higher selectivity of GC-MS/MS.
Keywords: Phthalate esters, Diet, Gas chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry, Gas chromatograph mass spectrometer
1Shimadzu Techno-Research, Inc., Kyoto, Japan
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