Trace-Level Determination Of Hydroxyatrazine And Dealkylated Degradation Products Of Atrazine In Waters

Abstract

Dealkylated degradation products of atrazine, dealkyl- and deisopropyl-atrazine have been now detected in environmental waters, but determination of hydroxyatrazine has not been reported just because this product is not amenable to GC-MS. An analytical procedure has been developed for the simultaneous trace-level determination of some widely used chorotriazines and of three main degradation products, deisopropyl-, deethyl- and hydroxyatrazine, using a selective solid-phase-extraction coupled on-line to liquid chromatography. The preconcentration has been carried out with two precolumns in series. The first one, packed with the PRP-1 sorbent allowed the preconcentration of hydroxyatrazine and other metabolites. Analytes of interest were then desorbed from the PRP-1 precolumn in their ionic form and transferred to a second precolumn packed with a cation exchanger, which was afterwards coupled on-line to an analytical C18 column. The use of the selective cation-exchanger sorbent for the preconcentration and of the on-line HPLC analysis led to detection limits as low as 2–5 ng/l in samples from the river Seine, without any clean-up procedure.

Key Words:

• Hydroxyatrazine
• deethylatrazine
• deisopropylatrazine
• on-line preconcentration
• HPLC.