ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on pharmacologically active compounds (PACs) in the aqueous environment, current state of the art, and critical evaluation of existing analytical approaches. Human PACs enter the aqueous environment mainly through insufficiently treated sewage from households and hospitals, waste effluents from manufacturing processes, and runoff. The need to investigate the enantiomeric fate of pollutants in the environment has led to the development of chiral chromatography methods with suitable mobile phase compositions for coupling to mass spectrometry. Liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry has become the tool of choice for the analysis of pollutants in environmental matrices. Tandem mass spectrometry is essential for the analysis of environmental pollutants due to the high sensitivity and specificity demanded for parts per thousand-to-parts per billion determinations in such complex matrices. Hydrophilic interaction chromatography is a mode of separating polar chemicals with conventional normal-phase silica-based polar stationary phases and mobile phases similar to reversed-phase chromatography.
