The analysis of food and environmental samples for contaminants by LC-MS has become a quick and cost-effective routine application when run in a targeted fashion, but this method disregards events or circumstances not taken into account beforehand. We describe a method by one data set can serve for routine high throughput quantitative analysis and for versatile non-targeted investigations in a highly automated manner.
Contaminants of emerging concern (CEC) in the environment are generally described as compounds that are unknown or unrecognized, undetected or not routinely monitored, and represent a diverse group of chemicals that may pose a risk to human health and the environment. Due to limited analytical capability and available resources , monitoring of CECs has been focused on selected analytes rather than a holistic approach. We describe a new analytical method that can be used in the quantitative analysis of 61 targeted and 312 non-targeted CECs.
