High performance liquid chromatography applied in hormone contaminations detection: A scoping review in ecotoxicology

ABSTRACT

The present work shows a systematic overview of studies about the methods used to quantify the estrogen 17β-estradiol, estrone, estriol and 17α-ethynylestradiol in surface water through high performance liquid chromatography. The PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases were searched. Articles from the last 10 years have been selected, and only in English language. Literature search strategy involved the keywords “estradiol”, “High Performance Liquid Chromatography”, “HPLC” and “water”. Initially, 955 articles were found. After applying the exclusion criteria (repetition, objective different from scope, lack of information defined as elementary, free availability, among others), it was verified that 17 articles fulfill all the characteristics for the proposed overview. We extracted data on type of HPLC equipment, detectors, wavelength, chromatographic columns, limit of detection, limit of quantification, mobile phase, and time retention. The most commonly used detectors were the tandem mass spectrometric. The limits of detection and quantification were in the unit of measurement of ng L⁻¹. With this overview, the importance of high-performance liquid chromatography has been demonstrated to deepen research on estrogen hormone quantification, given the current growth of scientific community concern about the detection of such endocrine disrupters in surface water.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Estradiol hormones
• high performance liquid chromatography
• methodologies
• water