Determining Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds in Bird Feathers Using Pressurized Fluid Extraction

Due to their ease of collecting and transporting from the field and their ability to accumulate pollutants, bird feathers are increasingly being used as a non-invasive biomonitoring tool for environmental monitoring programs. Polycyclic aromatic compounds (PACs) are a diverse class of environmental pollutants, and because of their deleterious impacts on biological species, monitoring these compounds in wildlife is of high importance. Current approaches to measuring PACs in bird feathers involve a time-consuming acid treatment with a concomitant solvent extraction step. Here, a validated method for measuring a suite of PACs in bird feathers using pressurized fluid extraction and identification and quantitation by gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry is presented. Chicken (Gallus domesticus) feathers were purposely fortified with a suite of 34 PACs separately at three fortification levels and placed inside a pressurized fluid extraction cell containing silica gel/deactivated alumina to provide in situ clean-up of the sample. Except for anthracene and naphthalene, the accuracy of our method ranged for PAHs from 70–120% (irrespective of fortification level), and our intra- and inter-day repeatability was smaller than 28%. For APAHs, our accuracies ranged from 38–158%, and the inter- and intra-day repeatability was less than 35%. Our limits of detection and quantitation for both groups of compounds ranged from 0.5–13 and 1.5–44.3 ng/g, respectively. Overall, the developed method represents an effective and efficient approach for the extraction and quantitation of PACs from bird feathers that negated the need for the time-consuming and potentially harmful acid treatment.