Determination of the Concentrations of 176 Pharmaceutical and Personal Care Products in Drinking Water Samples by Ultra-high Performance Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry

Abstract

A method for simultaneous determination of 176 pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) in drinking water samples was established by combining solid-phase extraction (SPE) with ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS). The water samples were adjusted to pH 7, and then subjected to enrichment and purification using a Cleanert PEP SPE column. After concentration of the eluate with dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), the chromatographic separation was carried out on an HSS T3 column (2.1 mm × 150 mm, 1.8 μm) using methanol-0.1% formic acid water (containing 0.2 mmol ammonium acetate) as the mobile phase. The detection was performed in positive and negative ionization switching modes with multiple reaction monitoring (MRM). Methodological validation results showed that good linearity for the 176 PPCPs was achieved in the concentration range of 5–200 ng/mL, with a correlation coefficient higher than 0.99. The limit of quantitation (LOQ) of the method for all the PPCPs was 0.1 ng/mL. The average recoveries of spiked blank samples at three levels (0.1, 0.4 and 1.0 ng/mL) were between 68.0% and 126.7%, with relative standard deviation (RSD) between 1.1% and 10.3% (n = 6). In conclusion, the method established in this study is simple, rapid, reproducible, and highly sensitive, and can meet the requirements of the high-throughput detection of the 176 PPCPs in drinking water sources.

Keywords

• solid-phase extraction; ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry; pharmaceutical and personal care products; water