Determination of fragrance ingredients in fish by ultrasound-assisted extraction followed by purge & trap

Abstract

Fragrance materials are widely used in household and personal care products in applications that can lead to emissions into the aquatic environment. Assessing the potential of fragrance materials to bioaccumulate in fish in in vivo laboratory studies requires a reliable analytical method for determining the concentrations of chemical substances in fish tissue. Here, we present an analytical method for simultaneously measuring a group of model chemicals that are representative of chemicals found in fragrance materials in rainbow trout. This method involves ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE) followed by enrichment of the fragrance ingredients using a purge & trap system. Nine fragrance ingredients including semi-volatile and volatile compounds were selected as model substances for method development. Homogenised whole rainbow trout subsamples were spiked with these nine model fragrance ingredients, hexachlorobenzene (HCB) and 2,2′,5,5′-tetrachlorobiphenyl (PCB52). The targeted chemicals were extracted from the fish tissue using acetonitrile in an ultrasonic bath; after solvent exchange to hexane, they were extracted into the gas phase by heating the samples and purging with nitrogen and trapped on a solid-phase extraction (SPE) cartridge. Finally, these chemicals were eluted with hexane from the SPE column and analysed using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The proposed method has been evaluated for blanks, spiked recoveries and precision, which are all acceptable. We believe that the method presented here is generally applicable for analysis of acid-sensitive volatile and semi-volatile organic chemicals in fish and provides the basis to conduct in vivo bioaccumulation studies of fragrance materials.