Method Improvement for the Determination and Quantification of PCBs in the Muscle Tissues of Arctic Char (Salvelinus salvelinus) and European Whitefish (Coregonus acronius) from Lake Vättern, Sweden

• Main Author: Sejfic, Melli
• Format: Bachelor Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Örebro universitet, Institutionen för naturvetenskap och teknik 2015
• Subjects: PCBs; Arctic char; European whitefish; Lake Vättern; sample pretreatment; silica; Chemical Sciences; Kemi; Arctic
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:oru:diva-46054

Lake Vättern has been contaminated with high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) for decades, which could be due to the release of wastes from industries and urban communities surrounding the water system. This has especially had a negative effect on fatty fishes, which could accumulate large amounts of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and thereby also become a source of environmental toxicants to humans through consumption. Most PCB analysis only quantify a handful of congeners, the so called indicator-PCBs (I-PCBs), but this might leave out important information. In this study, an existing analytical method was improved by supplementing with additional congeners to detect a larger set of PCB congeners in Arctic char (Salvelinus salvelinus) and European whitefish (Coregonus acronius) caught from Lake Vättern, Sweden. New pre-packed multilayer silica columns from CAPE technologies were tested and used to pretreat the fish samples prior to analysis with a Gas Chromatograph coupled to low-resolution Mass Spectrometer using Atmospheric Pressure Ionization (API GC/MS). It was found that modifications of the clean up method for PCBs were necessary, such as lowering the amount of hexane in the washing step and combining the two eluent fractions. The Arctic char and the European whitefish showed a fat content of 0.18% and 0.74%, respectively. Concentrations of detected congeners ranged from 0.5 to 1470 pg g-1 fresh weight (fw) in Arctic char and varied between 1.2 to 6550 pg g-1 in European whitefish. For Arctic char and European whitefish, the WHO2005-TEQ values were 0.4 pg g-1 fw and 0.6 pg g-1 fw, respectively. The greatest total PCB concentration of 25900 pg g-1 was measured in European whitefish. The total concentration of I-PCBs (#28, 52, 101, 138, 153, 180) was 3710 pg g-1 for the Arctic char and 13900e pg g-1 for the European whitefish. All obtained results were lower than those reported from other studies. Constructed congener profiles show that the two species have similar ratios of PCB #138 and #153. Differences are observed of PCBs with a higher chlorination grade, probably due to differences in migration patterns, habitats of the lake, diets, metabolism or bioaccumulation.