Enantiomeric determination of chiral drugs in environmental waters

Abstract

This Doctoral Thesis is mainly focused on the development and application of sensitive and selective analytical methods for the enantiomeric determination of a group of cathinones in environmental water samples on the use of solid-phase extraction (SPE) followed by chiral liquid chromatography (LC) coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS). For this purpose, in the first section of this Thesis, chiral LC separation methods were developed for target analytes. Different chiral stationary phases were evaluated for their chiral recognition abilities in different elution modes. The factors that affected the enantioseparation were optimized to achieve successful enantioseparations. In the second section, the optimized enantioseparation method was coupled to HRMS for the enantiomeric determination of five cathinones in environmental water samples. To improve the selectivity of the methods, different SPE sorbents (including mixed-mode cationic exchange sorbents and molecularly imprinted polymers) were assessed for the extraction of target cathinones. Different SPE parameters were carefully optimized to achieve high recoveries and selectivity for the analytes. The developed method was successfully applied for the enantiomeric determination of target cathinones in river water and effluent wastewater samples.