Application of thymine-based copolymers in the quantification of organic pollutants in water by sensitized fluorescence

LEDESMA, JULIETA; BOSCHETTI, CARLOS E.; MARTINO, DEBORA M.; BORTOLATO, SANTIAGO A.

MICROCHEMICAL JOURNAL

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Año: 2020 vol. 155

0026-265X

Bio-inspired copolymersbased on thymine can interact with certain organic molecules and therefore theycan be used as organized media or as optical sensors for analyticaldeterminations. Particularly, the thymine-based copolymers have a high affinityfor benzo(a)pyrene (BaP) and pyrene (Pyr), two main persistent organic pollutantsin water. In the present work, such interaction is applied for the developmentof a simple analytical method based on fluorescence enhancement of BaP and Pyr.Since BaP and Pyr fluorescence spectra are strongly overlapped, a multivariateanalysis of the data is proposed. The selectivity of the method was achievedthrough a parallel factors analysis (PARAFAC) of excitation-emissionfluorescence matrices. The method performance was tested by simultaneousdetermination of BaP and Pyr in water samples, without pre-concentration stepsor full chromatographic resolution. Studies of recovery for both analytes addedto tap and surface waters were done, obtaining results in the order of 87-115%.The analysis was performed in the presence of additional species whose signalsoverlap with those of the analytes. In all cases, the calculated analyticalfigures of merit were compared with those obtained by the referencechromatographic method. In addition, a comparison of our method with thereference one is made based on the calculation of their respective eco-scales.The quality of the achieved results indicates that a second-order advantage wasreached, while our method represents a greener alternative than the referencechromatographic methodology