Determination of Environmental Estrogens by Polybenzothiophene-based Solid-phase Extraction (SPE) and High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC)

Abstract

Porous polybenzothiophene was synthesized using Friedel-Crafts alkylation and applied as a sorbent for phase extraction. In combination with high performance liquid chromatography, a method for the simultaneous determination of the estrogens 17β-estradiol, ethinylestradiol, and diethylstilbestrol was established for environmental samples. Under the optimized conditions, satisfactory linearity was obtained from 2.0 to 1000.0 μg/L with the coefficients of determination (R²) exceeding 0.9977. The limits of detection were less than 0.3 μg/L for all targets, and the relative standard deviations (n = 5) were below 6.7%. The developed procedure was applied for the determination of estrogens in lake water, grass carp, and chicken manure. The recoveries of the targets were from 75.3% to 106.7%, 78.8% to 109.6%, and 89.1% to 114.5%, respectively. Ethinylestradiol was detected in lake water at 5.3 μg/L. None of the target compounds were present in the grass carp. Ethinylestradiol and diethylstilbestrol were observed in chicken manure at 0.9 μg/g and 0.6 μg/g. The developed method was simple and efficient for the determination of trace estrogens in complex samples.

Keywords:

• Environmental analysis
• environmental estrogens
• high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)
• polybenzothiophene
• solid-phase extraction (SPE)

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that influenced the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Investigation of Pollutant Output in Aquaculture of Sichuan Aquaculture Bureau (80303-AHW013).