Targeted and Non-Targeted LC- and GC-HRMS Workflows for the Analysis of Emerging Contaminants and the Environmental Exposome
A special issue of Metabolites (ISSN 2218-1989). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Metabolomics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 21 May 2026 | Viewed by 3545
Special Issue Editors
Interests: liquid chromatography; high-resolution mass spectrometry; metabolomics; exposomics; chemicals of environmental concern; data analysis; chemometrics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: liquid chromatography; gas chromatography; mass spectrometry; environmental analytical chemistry; food analytical chemistry
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The synthesis of new and diverse chemicals of industrial interest (e.g., pesticides, fabric and plastic additives, pharmaceuticals) have significantly increased in the past decades. Anthropic activities promote their release into the environment, exposing living organisms (including humans) to a "cocktail" of known and unknown (e.g., transformation products) chemicals, with no evidence of their environmental and health impact. For this reason, and also at the regulatory level (e.g., EU Directive 2020/2184 and decision 2022/1307, USEPA CompTox Dashboard), there is an urgent demand to extend the qualitative and quantitative monitoring of these substances, also known as chemicals of environmental concerns (CECs), in direct exposure sources to humans (e.g., drinking water).
To this extent, external environmental exposomics aims at comprehensively characterizing the chemical space of CECs occurring in environmental matrices acting as exposure sources to individuals throughout lifetime.
Chromatographic techniques (i.e., LC and GC) in combination with high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) have the potential to characterize and quantify CEC chemical space in exposure matrices through the optimization and development of non-targeted (NTAs) and targeted (TA) analysis workflows. Even though relevant progresses have been made in the development of exposome research approaches, the massive challenges in wet and dry laboratories (e.g., expensive equipment, analytical expertise, complex data analysis) limit their applications and the exploration of the chemistry space of the environmental exposome.
This Special Issue aims to collect innovative research (i) developing novel HRMS-based LC or GC methods and (ii) untangling external exposome complexity through integrated wet–dry lab TA and NTA workflows. The presented results will increase the knowledge on the latest analytical methodologies and their power in detecting the exposome chemical space.
Dr. Lapo Renai
Dr. Massimo Del Bubba
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- chromatography
- high-resolution mass spectrometry
- non-targeted analysis
- exposome
- data analysis
- environmental analysis
- pharmaceuticals
- poly- and perfluorinated substances
- personal care products
- transformation products feature detection and identification
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