Application of design of experiment for quantification of 71 new psychoactive substances in influent wastewater.

BACKGROUND

New psychoactive substances (NPS) are of public health concern due to their sporadic proliferation and the dearth of information on toxicity when consumed. In addition to seized data from forensic and toxicology reporting, wastewater analysis serves as a complimentary tool for NPS surveillance. A method to detect 71 NPS by simple filtration followed by liquid-chromatography tandem mass spectrometry was developed to detect multiclass NPS consisting of arylcyclohexylamines, designer benzodiazepines, synthetic cannabinoids, synthetic opioids, phenethylamines, synthetic cathinones, tryptamines, and indole alkaloids.

RESULTS

In this work, the influential factors for electrospray ionisation were identified and optimised using the fractional factorial design and face-centred central composite design, respectively. The filtration loss during sample clean-up was assessed for all compounds. The final method was validated and applied to wastewater collected from a music festival held in Queensland in 2022. The validated method had linearity between 0.5 ng L

SIGNIFICANCE

Systematic electrospray ionisation optimisation using the design of experiment for a large method is practical and provides in-depth chemical information on studied compounds. The optimised method demonstrated the applicability of analysing samples collected from a festival in this work.

Informations de copyright

Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.