High-performance thin-layer chromatography coupled with HPLC-DAD/HPLC-MS/MS for simultaneous determination of...

Bisphenol A (BPA) and its brominated analogs exhibiting bioaccumulation potential, endocrine disruption, and reproductive toxicity have been worldwide detected in water, air, soil, and sediments. But few methods have been proposed for simultaneously determining a variety of these compounds in biological matrices, hindering the further study on their biological transformation/degradation and health risks. In this study, a simple, solvent-saving and sensitive method based on high-performance thin-layer chromatography (HPTLC) for sample pretreatment coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography-diode array detector (HPLC-DAD) (UV = 214 nm)/triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (MS/MS) was developed for determining BPA and its nine brominated analogs in biological samples. The method detection limits (MDLs) and method quantification limits (MQLs) for ten BPA analogs ranged from 0.8 to 685.7 ng g^-1 dw (S/N = 3) and 2.7 to 2285.7 ng g^-1 dw (S/N = 10), respectively. The recoveries were 64-124% with SD less than 10%. The RSD of intermediate precision was less than 11%, and matrix effects were lower than 19%. Compared with traditional purification procedures, HPTLC largely reduced the workload and procedures for complex biological sample cleanup without inducing decomposition of the analytes. The proposed method exhibited good performance when detecting these ten chemicals in chicken samples from a nearby yard of brominated flame retardant plants, indicating its great potential for investigating their environment level, behavior, and fate in organisms. Graphical abstract ᅟ.