Study of a pseudostationary phase based carbon nanotubes for the separation of emerging pollutants

L.L. SOMBRA; A.P. SALINAS; P.W. STEGE

San Luis

Congreso; XXXVII Reunión Científica Anual de la Sociedad de Biología de Cuyo; 2019

Drugs are emerging contaminants that cause greater concern due to the fact that their consumption is massive, they are poorly biodegradable and continuously discharged without the possibility of being eliminated by the purification systems. Some antibiotics, analgesics and anti-inflammatories are included in priority lists of hazardous substances. It has been shown that its presence in aquatic environments can cause ecotoxicity. The development of analytical methods, that alert the presence of drugs in the environment, is fundamental.Capillary electrophoresis (CE) is a technique with a great projection that offers a very interesting alternative to liquid chromatography.Taking into account its global high consumption, the studied drugs were paracetamol, naproxen, piroxicam, ketorolac, trimethoprim, sulfamethoxazole, cephalexin and amoxicillin. PSP consisted in 20 mM sodium tetraboratebuffer, pH 9.4, with carboxylated carbon nanotubes (c-MWNTs) was studied. A voltage of 12 kV was applied and the detector was set at 190 nm.The results shows the interactions between the analytes and the c-MWNTs resulted in an increase in migration time. On the other hand, and as expected, we could not achieve a good separation of the analytes with a fused silica capillary without PSP. Under the optimal conditions we were able to separate and determine the studied drugs in less than 20 min.The CEC procedure developed in this work was precise, reproducible and sensitive. The advantages of this method include simplicity with high selectivity, as well as low cost and efficiency through the use of c-MWNTs as a pseudo-stationary phase, which demonstrates a great potential for application to the analysis of emerging contaminants in environmental samples.