Direct determination of levoglucosan at the picogram per milliliter level in Antarctic ice by high-performance liquid chromatography/electrospray ionization triple quadrupole mass spectrometry

• Main Authors: Andrea Gambaro, Roberta Zangrando, Paolo Gabrielli, Carlo Barbante, Paolo Cescon
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2008
• Subjects: Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1071.7141; http://research.bpcrc.osu.edu/Icecore/publications/Gambaro%20et%20al%20AC%202008.pdf

A method for the direct determination of levoglucosan at the picogram per milliliter level in less than 1 mL of Antarctic ice has been developed. Chemical analysis is performed by high-performance liquid chromatography with triple quadrupole tandem mass spectrometric detection. Levoglucosan, a specific molecular marker for biomass burning, is identified by negative ion electrospray mass spectrometry using m/z 161/113, 161/101, 161/ 85, and 161/71 as monitoring ion transitions. Contamination problems were carefully taken into account by adopting ultraclean procedures during sampling and sample pretreatment phases. The limit of detection is 3 pg mL -1 (0.3 pg absolute amount injected); the repeatability ranges between 20% and 50% at a concentration of 20 and 9 pg mL -1 , respectively. This methodology allowed the direct determination of levoglucosan in a 1 mL sample of Antarctic ice with concentration ranges between 4 and 30 pg mL -1 . To our knowledge these are the first levoglucosan concentrations reported for Antarctic ice.