Column switching helps resolve contaminant interference in environmental samples

A team of scientists led by Takuya Kubo of the Graduate School of Environmental Studies at Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan) has published a method for reducing contaminants in environmental water analysis with liquid chromatography.

In environmental analysis, detection interference caused by contaminants such as humic acids is a common problem. Also, because of the smaller diameter and fine particle size often used in analytical high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) columns, column clogging is often a challenge as well.

The team addressed those problems by using column-switching HPLC, which consists of a pretreatment column containing surface-modified polymer particles and flow changeover valves for cleaning the remaining matrices in the pretreatment column before analysis. This method was successfully applied to the analysis of bisphenol A using HPLC with fluorescence detection. The limit of detection (LOD) in real samples was