Characterization of Air Particulate Material for Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds

摘要

In studies to evaluate the potential health and ecological effects of atmospheric emissions, bioassays have been employed in conjunction with chemical characterization to correlate mutagenic and/or carcinogenic activity with chemical composition. The complexity of an air particulate extract necessitates the prefractionation of the mixture into suitable subfractures or chemical classes prior to chemical characterization and/or biological testing. The goal of this project was to evaluate such a fractionation scheme for air particulate material with respect to chemical characterization of the various fractions with particular emphasis on the identification of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH). In this study the authors have used three chromatographic approaches to separate, identify, and quantify the complex mixture of PAH extracted from SRM 1649 (Urban Dust/Organics): (1) capillary GC, (2) LC with selective fluorescence detection, and (3) multidimensional chromatographic techniques.