Trends in the Analysis and Exploration of per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) in Environmental Matrices: A Review

Abstract

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) is an emerging class of organic pollutants of concern and is now prevalent in environmental matrices including water, soil, air, and biological. So far, several standard analytical methods have been developed to systematically analyze PFAS in different environmental matrices. However, the complexity of environmental matrices makes the effective extraction of PFAS difficult, and the legacy PFAS is gradually changing into a new PFAS with short chain and unknown structure in production, which makes the analysis of PFAS challenging. In this review, the following aspects are summarized: (1) the advances in standard analytical methods for PFAS in different environmental matrices, and further generalizes the updating novel extraction and detection methods; (2) the analysis of unknown PFAS, the suspect and non-targeted screening analysis method of PFAS based on high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) is systematically described.

Keywords:

• PFAS
• standard analytical method

Author contributions

Conceptualization: Zhen Zhou; Writing – Original Draft: Yunxiang Shen; Writing – Review & Editing: Ling Wang; Visualization: Yi Ding, Shunman Liu, and Yuan Li; Supervision: Yong Liang.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2019M660185), National Natural Science Foundation of China (22136006, 22193051), and University’s Scientific Research Project by JHUN (2022SXZX07).