Background

Substantial efforts have been made to monitor potentially hazardous anthropogenic contaminants in surface waters while for plant secondary metabolites (PSMs) almost no data on occurrence in the water cycle are available. These metabolites enter river waters through various pathways such as leaching, surface run-off and rain sewers or input of litter from vegetation and might add to the biological activity of the chemical mixture. To reduce this data gap, we conducted a LC–HRMS target screening in river waters from two different catchments for 150 plant metabolites which were selected from a larger database considering their expected abundance in the vegetation, their potential mobility, persistence and toxicity in the water cycle and commercial availability of standards.

Results

The screening revealed the presence of 12 out of 150 possibly toxic PSMs including coumarins (bergapten, scopoletin, fraxidin, esculetin and psoralen), a flavonoid (formononetin) and alkaloids (lycorine and narciclasine). The compounds narciclasine and lycorine were detected at concentrations up to 3 µg/L while esculetin and fraxidin occurred at concentrations above 1 µg/L. Nine compounds occurred at concentrations above 0.1 µg/L, the Threshold for Toxicological Concern (TTC) for non-genotoxic and non-endocrine disrupting chemicals in drinking water.

Conclusions

Our study provides an overview of potentially biologically active PSMs in surface waters and recommends their consideration in monitoring and risk assessment of water resources. This is currently hampered by a lack of effect data including toxicity to aquatic organisms, endocrine disruption and genotoxicity and demands for involvement of these compounds in biotesting.

中文翻译：

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液相色谱-高分辨质谱法（LC-HRMS）靶标筛选河水中的植物次生代谢产物

背景

已经做出了巨大的努力来监测地表水中的潜在危险人为污染物，而对于植物次生代谢物（PSM），几乎没有关于水循环中发生的数据。这些代谢物通过淋洗，地表径流和下水道或来自植被的垃圾输入等各种途径进入河水，可能会增加化学混合物的生物活性。为了缩小此数据差距，我们在两个不同集水区的河水中进行了LC-HRMS目标筛查，筛选出150种植物代谢物，这些代谢物是从一个较大的数据库中选择的，考虑到它们在植被中的预期丰度，其潜在的迁移性，持久性和在水中的毒性标准的周期和商业可用性。

结果

筛查显示，在150种可能有毒的PSM中，有12种存在，包括香豆素（香菜素，香豆素，fraxidin，七叶皂素和补骨脂素），类黄酮（甲酮）和生物碱（lycorine和narciclasine）。检出浓度最高为3 µg / L的化合物水仙子碱和lycorine，而七叶皂甙和fraxidin的浓度最高为1 µg / L。九种化合物的浓度超过0.1 µg / L，这是饮用水中非遗传毒性和非内分泌干扰化学物质的毒理学阈值（TTC）。

结论

我们的研究概述了地表水中潜在的具有生物活性的PSM，并建议在水资源的监测和风险评估中考虑它们。目前，这由于缺乏影响数据而受到阻碍，这些数据包括对水生生物的毒性，内分泌干扰和遗传毒性，以及要求这些化合物参与生物测试。