Publications by authors named "Matthias Muschket"

Persistent and mobile (PM) chemicals are considered detrimental for drinking water resources as they may pass through all barriers protecting these resources against pollution. However, knowledge on the occurrence of PM chemicals in the water cycle, that make their way into drinking water resources, is still limited. The effluents of six municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs, n = 38), surface water of two rivers (n = 32) and bank filtrate of one site (n = 15) were analyzed for 127 suspected PM chemicals.

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Persistent and mobile (PM) substances are able to spread quickly in the water cycle and were thus identified as potentially problematic for the environment and water quality. If also toxic (PMT) or very persistent and very mobile (vPvM) their regulation under REACH as substances of very high concern is foreseen. Yet, knowledge on the effectiveness of advanced wastewater treatment in removing PM-substances from WWTP effluents is limited to few rather well-known chemicals.

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Present knowledge about the fate of persistent and mobile (PM) substances in drinking water treatment is limited. Hence, this study assesses the potential of fixed-bed granular activated carbon (GAC) filters to fill the treatment gap for PM substances and the elimination predictability from lab-scale experiments. Two parallel pilot filters (GAC bed height 2 m, diameter 15 cm) with different GAC were operated for 1.

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Persistent and mobile (PM) substances among the organic micropollutants have gained increasing interest since their inherent properties enable them to enrich in water cycles. This study set out to investigate the potential of adsorption onto activated carbon as a drinking water treatment option for 19 PM candidates in batch experiments in a drinking water matrix using a microporous and a mesoporous activated carbon. Overall, adsorption of PM candidates proved to be very variable and the extent of removal could not be directly related to molecular properties.

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Persistent and mobile chemicals (PM chemicals) were searched for in surface waters by hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC) and supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC), both coupled to high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS). A suspect screening was performed using a newly compiled list of 1310 potential PM chemicals to the data of 11 surface water samples from two river systems. In total, 64 compounds were identified by this approach.

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Article Synopsis
  • Recent studies identified the antiandrogen compounds C47 and its transformation products as new environmental contaminants in the Holtemme River in Germany.
  • * A wastewater-treatment plant was found to be the primary source of these compounds, which persisted in the river with only partial transformation and significant dilution affecting their concentrations.
  • *Analysis showed that these compounds may bind strongly to sediment, leading to minimal removal from water, and they exhibited steady bioaccumulation in local gammarids, suggesting ecological risks.
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Ozonation is an important process to further reduce the trace organic chemicals (TrOCs) in treated municipal wastewater before discharge into surface waters, and is expected to form products that are more oxidized and more polar than their parent compounds. Many of these ozonation products (OPs) are biodegradable and thus removed by post-treatment (e.g.

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Meeting ecological and water quality standards in lotic ecosystems is often failed due to multiple stressors. However, disentangling stressor effects and identifying relevant stressor-effect-relationships in complex environmental settings remain major challenges. By combining state-of-the-art methods from ecotoxicology and aquatic ecosystem analysis, we aimed here to disentangle the effects of multiple chemical and non-chemical stressors along a longitudinal land use gradient in a third-order river in Germany.

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  • Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) are commonly found in the environment but have been poorly studied in edible plants, particularly focusing on perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs).
  • A new analytical method was developed to quantify 16 intermediate PFAS transformation products and 18 PFAAs in various plants using advanced extraction and chromatography techniques.
  • The analysis revealed the presence of certain transformation products, notably N-ethyl perfluorooctane sulfonamidoacetic acid (EtFOSAA) and perfluorooctane sulfonamide (FOSA), in high concentrations in maize leaves, indicating widespread contamination in crops from polluted agricultural fields.
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  • Persistent mobile organic substances (PM substances) threaten water quality and existing analytical methods for their measurement are insufficient for large samples.
  • A new analytical technique using azeotrope evaporation and supercritical fluid chromatography with high-resolution mass spectrometry was developed and validated for 17 PM substances, showing good recovery rates and precision.
  • This method successfully detected PM substances like acesulfame and trifluoromethanesulfonic acid in various water sources, highlighting its effectiveness for monitoring water quality.
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Article Synopsis
  • * A study in the German river Holtemme utilized effect-directed analysis (EDA) to identify the potent antiandrogen 4-methyl-7-diethylaminocoumarin (C47) and its derivatives, revealing C47's potency was over 5.2 times greater than the known antiandrogen flutamide.
  • * C47 was detected in concentrations that indicate significant antiandrogenic activity and was shown to disrupt endocrine function in fish, raising concerns about its potential impact on aquatic ecosystems and human exposure due to its presence in consumer products.
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Bioactivity screening studies often face sample amount limitation with respect to the need for reliable, reproducible and quantitative results. Therefore approaches that minimize sample use are needed. Low-volume exposure and chemical dilution procedures were applied in an androgen receptor reporter gene human cell line assay to evaluate environmental contaminants and androgen receptor modulators, which were the agonist 5α-dihydrotestosterone (DHT); and the antagonists flutamide, bisphenol A, 1-hydroxypyrene and triclosan.

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Aquatic environments are often contaminated with complex mixtures of chemicals that may pose a risk to ecosystems and human health. This contamination cannot be addressed with target analysis alone but tools are required to reduce this complexity and identify those chemicals that might cause adverse effects. Effect-directed analysis (EDA) is designed to meet this challenge and faces increasing interest in water and sediment quality monitoring.

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The separation of isomeric phosphorylated peptides is challenging and often impossible for multiphosphorylated isomers using chromatographic and capillary electrophoretic methods. In this study we investigated the separation of a set of single-, double-, and triple-phosphorylated peptides (corresponding to the human tau protein) by ion-pair reversed-phase chromatography (IP-RPC) and hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC). In HILIC both hydroxyl and aminopropyl stationary phases were tested with aqueous acetonitrile in order to assess their separation efficiency.

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