Deciphering polymer degradation chemistry integrating new database construction into suspect screening analysis.

Water-soluble synthetic polymers and their environmental degradation products are overlooked but important industrial pollutants in wastewater. However, the detection of degradation products is limited to bulk solution chemistry and molecular-level analysis remains unreachable. In this work, we assessed the feasibility of current suspect screening and nontarget workflow using liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS) to elucidate molecular level information about polyacrylamide (PAM) and its degraded products by free radicals.