Recent Progress on Toxicity and Detection Methods of Polychlorinated Biphenyls in Environment and Foodstuffs

Abstract

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a class of synthetic organochlorine chemicals, were broadly employed in industrial and commercial applications in the last century due to their good thermal and chemical stability. However, PCBs have a great influence on both individual organism and the entire ecosystem. It has been proven that PCBs pose potential risks to human health with neurotoxicity, carcinogenicity, reproductive toxicity, immunotoxicity, hepatotoxicity, and cardiovascular toxicity. Moreover, PCBs exhibit the long-range transport effect on the global scale and bio-enrichment effect along the food chains. This review mainly encompasses recent progress on the toxicity and detection techniques of PCBs in environment and foodstuffs. First of all, we highlighted the latest improvements and achievements of the classification, source, distribution, and toxicity of PCBs. Then, comprehensive summaries of the current technologies for sample preparation (e.g., SPE, DSPE, SPME and SBSE) and analytical determination (e.g., GC-ECD, GC-MS, GC-HRMS, HPLC-MS/MS and sensing technologies) were given. In the end, the shortcomings and prospects of the pretreatment methods for PCBs analysis as well as the future opportunities and challenges are tentatively discussed.

Graphical Abstract

Overview of toxicity and advanced methods for determination of PCBs in environment and foodstuffs.

Keywords:

• Analytical determination
• environment and foodstuffs
• polychlorinated biphenyls
• sample preparation
• toxicity

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the National R&D Key Programme of China (No. 2017YFE0110800), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21677085, 31801454 and 21537001), the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2017JL012), the Science and Technology Nova Plan of Shaanxi Province (2019KJXX-010), the Project funded by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2018M640574), and the Youth Innovation Team of Shaanxi Universities (Food Quality and Safety Innovation Team).