Target and non-target screening strategies for organic contaminants, residues and illicit substances in food, environmental and human biological samples by UHPLC-QTOF-MS

In this paper, we illustrate the potential of ultra-high performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) coupled with hybrid quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (QTOF MS) for large scale screening of organic contaminants in different types of samples. Thanks to the full-spectrum acquisition at satisfactory sensitivity, it is feasible to apply both (post)-target and non-target approaches for the rapid qualitative screening of organic pollutants in food, biological and environmental samples. Different strategies have been applied and compared in this work. The first approach consists of target screening based on automatically extracting the exact analyte masses with a narrow mass window (±10 mDa). The selection of analytes can be made after MS acquisition as non-specific analyte information is required when injecting the samples. The second, non-targeted approach, consists of a first component detection step followed by the search of the detected components in home-made spectral libraries. In this work, two types of libraries have been evaluated: a theoretical database, including the molecular formula of a large number of pollutants (∼1000), and an empirical mass spectra library which includes a lower number of compounds for which reference standards were available. In all cases the confidence of the identification process was excellent, thanks to the value of information given in QTOF MSE acquisition mode (i.e. simultaneous acquisition of low and high energy TOF MS spectra in a unique run). Both, target and non-target approaches, are complementary and both have advantages and drawbacks. Their application to different types of samples has allowed the detection of diverse organic compounds, for example the mycotoxin fumonisin B1 in food samples, cocaine and several metabolites in human urine, as well as several pesticides, antibiotics and drugs of abuse in urban wastewater.