Fast screening procedure for antibiotics in wastewaters by direct HPLC-DAD anal...

• Author(s): Teixeira, Salomé ; Delerue-Matos, Cristina ; Alves, Arminda ; Santos, Lúcia
• Date: 2008
• Origin: Repositório Científico do Instituto Politécnico do Porto
• Subject(s): Antibiotics; HPLC-DAD; Screening; Uncertainty; Wastewater
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

Growing concern about the contamination of wastewaters by antibiotics demands fast but sensitive analytical methodologies, for the screening of a large number of samples. The purpose of this work was to develop a simple methodology, using direct injection of the samples, by HPLC with diode array detection (DAD), for a multiresidue analysis of five antibiotics of different classes. Wastewater from an urban water treatment plant was selected as a model to study possible coelution of interfering compounds. The linearity interval ranged from 40 to 400 µg/L for amoxicillin (Amox), metronidazole (Metro), cefazolin (Cefa), and chloramphenicol (Chloram) and from 20 to 200 µg/L for sulfamethoxazole (Sulfa), with LODs lower than 14 µg/L. Repeatability, expressed by the CV of six repeated injections, ranged from 1 to 8%, while the intermediate precision varied between 2 and 11%. The recovery ranged from 90 to 109%. This method enables the fast screening of a large number of samples, with an expanded uncertainty in the 1–22% range. The advantage of the proposed method is to significantly reduce the number of samples to be analyzed by more complex methods.