Centennial Honors College
Western Illinois University
Undergraduate Research Day 2012
Poster Presentation
Determination of Pharmaceuticals in Water
Lisa Munster
Faculty Mentor: Hongxia Guan
Chemistry
The presence of pharmaceuticals in water is growing to become a problem for the
environment. Whether they are from water treatment plants or from residential areas,
they pollute the environment. Some pharmaceutically active compounds are designed
to show effects at low doses. In the past, different solid phase extractions were used for
cleanup and pre-concentration of trace analytes from environmental samples. These
processes usually took a considerable amount of time. Development of simple and
reliable methods for analysis of trace pharmaceuticals in water is a challenging task.
Sample preparation must be performed to avoid false positive results due to matrix
effects. Solid-phase extraction (SPE) techniques have gained increasing interest
because of their selectivity and because large volume of organic solvents are not
necessary. The SPE methods involved in this study was disposable pipette extraction
(DPX). DPX’s rapid intrinsic mixing capability results in fast extractions with analytes
being concentrated, and solvent evaporation is not necessary. Extraction of
pharmaceuticals from water using this technique achieved a sample preparation
throughput on the order of a few minutes per sample. Poly styrenedivinylbenzene
(SDVB) was studied to achieve selective extraction of pharmaceuticals in water. It was
found that SDVB provided good accuracy for the targeted pharmaceutical compounds
with recoveries above 90% for most compounds.