Speaker
Description
The increasing complexity of environmental contamination, characterized by mixtures of hundreds to thousands of known and unknown compounds, poses significant challenges for effective monitoring and risk assessment. In this context, advances in liquid chromatography coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS) have transformed the field of environmental analysis by enabling comprehensive and highly sensitive detection of a wide range of contaminants and molecular signatures in complex environmental matrices.
This talk will highlight the opportunities offered by HRMS for the identification of emerging contaminants, with a particular focus on suspect screening approaches. These strategies enable the systematic investigation of large numbers of compounds beyond conventional target analysis, substantially expanding the chemical space that can be explored in environmental samples. In addition, non-target HRMS approaches for the comprehensive molecular characterization of dissolved organic matter (DOM) will be presented, illustrating how these methods can reveal previously uncharacterized fractions of natural and anthropogenic organic mixtures in aquatic systems.
At the same time, the presentation will critically discuss the current challenges and limitations of LC-HRMS-based workflows. These include issues related to data complexity and dimensionality, compound annotation uncertainty, limited availability and quality of spectral libraries, false positives and negatives in suspect screening, and the lack of harmonized and reproducible data processing pipelines. Particular attention will also be given to the specific challenges associated with DOM analysis, including its intrinsic heterogeneity and the difficulty of assigning structural information to thousands of unresolved features. The importance of quality assurance, transparent reporting, and methodological standardization will also be addressed.
Analytical workflows for suspect and non-target screening will be presented, illustrating case studies involving different environmental matrices, including domestic wastewater, lake water, and urban runoff, to demonstrate the applicability of these approaches to real-world complex mixtures.
Overall, this presentation will showcase how LC-HRMS-based methodologies are advancing environmental monitoring towards more holistic and informative assessments of chemical contamination and organic matter complexity, while also highlighting the critical methodological challenges that must be addressed to fully realize their potential.