Influence of salinity and natural organic matter on the solid phase extraction of sterols and stanols: application to the determination of the human sterol fingerprint in aqueous matrices.

Faecal sterols have been proposed as direct chemical markers for the determination of faecal contamination in inland and coastal waters. In this study, we assess the impact of (a) the concentration of dissolved organic carbon (DOC), (b) the nature of DOC, (c) the salinity and (d) the concentration of sterols and stanols on their solid phase extraction. When natural organic matter (NOM) is modelled by humic acid, increasing DOC concentration from 2.7 to 15.4 mg/L has no significant impact on the recovery of sterols and stanols. The modelling of NOM by a mixture of humic acid and succinoglycan induces a significant (24%) decrease in the recovery of sterols and stanols. For all concentrations of target compounds, no significant increase in recovery is associated with increasing the salinity. Moreover, an increase in the recovery of target compounds is induced by an increase in their concentration. The nine target compounds and the recovery standard (RS) exhibit the same behaviour during the extraction step. Thus, we propose that (a) the concentration of target compounds can be corrected by the RS to calculate more realistic concentrations without modifying their profile and (b) the sterol fingerprint can be investigated in the colloidal fraction of aqueous samples without altering the information it could provide about the source. The application of this analytical method to waste water treatment plant influent and effluents yields results in agreement with previous studies concerning the use of those compounds to differentiate between sources of faecal contamination. We conclude that this analytical method is fully applicable to the determination of sterol fingerprints in the dissolved phase (<0.7 μm) of natural aqueous samples.