Extraction and Quantitation of Hydrophilic Atrazine Metabolites from Surface Water

Abstract

Atrazine is the most commonly used herbicide in the United States. The parent compound can be easily extracted from water and analyzed by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry or liquid chromatography (LC/MS), but analysis of its metabolites is more difficult. Many of these metabolites are too water soluble to be isolated on a typical C-18 solid-phase extraction (SPE) cartridge, and they cannot be separated effectively from humic material for quantitation by ultraviolet detection. The advent of a mixed-mode SPE cartridge, which combines a hydrophobic phase and a cation exchange phase, makes extraction of these basic compounds from water samples possible. A method has been developed in this laboratory to isolate atrazine and six atrazine metabolites from a 123 mL ground- or surface-water sample using a cation exchange mixed-mode SPE followed by LC/MS. Recoveries range from 80 to 100% for all of the compounds. Detection limits of 0.05 Î/L have been established for all of the analytes.

Additional information about the Organic Geochemistry Research Laboratory can be found at: http://ks.water.usgs.gov/studies/reslab/

Lindsey, M.E., and Thurman, E.M., 2001, Extraction and quantitation of hydrophilic atrazine metabolites from surface water [abst.], in Abstracts of Pittcon 2001, the Voyage of Discovery, March 4-9, 2001, New Orleans, Louisiana: p. 886.