Quality assurance and harmonization for targeted biomonitoring measurements of environmental organic chemicals across the Children's Health Exposure Analysis Resource laboratory network.

A consortium of laboratories established under the Children's Health Exposure Analysis Resource (CHEAR) used a multifaceted quality assurance program to promote measurement harmonization for trace organics analyses of human biospecimens that included: (1) participation in external quality assurance (EQA)/proficiency testing (PT) programs; (2) analyses of a urine-based CHEAR common quality control (QC) pool with each analytical batch across all participating laboratories; (3) method validation against NIST Standard Reference Materials® (SRMs); and (4) analyses of blinded duplicates and other project-specific QC samples. The capability of five CHEAR laboratories in organic chemical analysis increased across the 4-year period, and performance in the external PT program improved over time - recent challenges reporting >90% analytes with satisfactory performance. The CHEAR QC pools were analyzed for several classes of organic chemicals including phthalate metabolites and environmental phenols by the participating laboratories with every batch of project samples, which provided a rich source of measurement data for the assessment of intra- and inter-laboratory variance.

Photolysis Kinetics of Toluene, Ethylbenzene, and Xylenes at Ice Surfaces.

Benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes (BTEX) are important organic pollutants. These compounds do not undergo direct photolysis in natural waters because their absorbance spectra do not overlap with solar radiation at the Earth's surface. Recent research has suggested that benzene is able to undergo direct photolysis when present at ice surfaces.