Development of Sample Preparation Methods for Chemical Analysis of Household Chemical Products

Abstract

Although most household chemical products (HCPs) are generally safe, chemicals in HCPs may cause unexpected adverse effects on the human body if they are not correctly stored or used. Establishment of reliable sample preparation methods tailored to cover a wide range of HCPs is a prerequisite for evaluation of the potential toxicity of HCPs. In this study, we developed sampling and sample preparation methods for liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) to comprehensively identify the ingredients in 20 HCPs having diverse forms and formulations. Solid phase extraction of mid-polar to non-polar analytes with a basic solvent significantly decreased matrix interferences during electrospray ionization, leading to increased numbers of compound identification. Untargeted LC-MS/MS of 20 HCPs could tentatively identified 134 compounds using the NIST 20 MS library. Functional annotation of the identified compounds based on PubChem and CompTox database searches revealed that erucamide and alpha-ionone that are highly relevant to HCPs have the potential to cause skin irritation. Our developed sample preparation method for untargeted LC-MS/MS can be exploited to discover potential toxicants in HCPs.