Detection and environmental fate of pharmacologically active compounds
Bruce Brownawell
SUNY-Stony Brook
 

There has been much recent interest in the detection and widespread occurrence in the environment of wastewater derived chemicals.  Contaminants of emerging concerninclude prescription and nonprescription pharmaceuticals; naturally occurring steroid hormones; disinfectants; other personal care products (e.g., fragrances and shampoo ingredients); detergents; modern use household pesticides (e.g., DEET); and metabolites of these and more traditionally studied organic contaminants.  Many of these chemicals are potentially pharmacologically active and little is known about sublethal effects of complex mixtures of such chemicals. Interest in these chemicals have also been driven by interests in endocrine disruption sometimes observed in wildlife exposed to wastewater effects environments; increasing resistance to antibiotics in wild microbial populations; and concerns of the waste water and drinking water industries.  To date the preponderance of research has focused on analytical detection and measurements of the environmental distributions of these chemicals.  HPLC-MS with atmospheric ionization methods are proving to be especially valuable in the ultratrace level analysis of organic chemicals with polar and polarizable functional groups; our lab has been actively engaged for the past few years in pushing the development of such approaches; as a result we can now reliably measure many important classes of contaminants at concentrations down to 10 pg/L even in complex wastewater samples.  In the seminar the following topics will be presented: (1) overviews on contaminants of emerging concern and the power and potential applications of LC-MS, with a focus on applications using time-of-flight mass spectrometry; (2) past and recent results on the distribution, sources, and environmental fate of estrogenic steroid estrogens and alkylphenolethoxylates in NY Harbor (with a focus on sewage impacted Jamaica Bay); (3) recent results from studies of pharmaceutical and personal care product occurrences and fate in derived chemicals as tracers of sources and transport of nutrients, potentially toxic chemicals, and microbial pathogens in receiving waters.

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