Soil is of particular interest to the forensic community because it can be used as valuable associative evidence to link a suspect to a victim or a crime scene.Liquid chromatography is a powerful analytical tool for o...Soil is of particular interest to the forensic community because it can be used as valuable associative evidence to link a suspect to a victim or a crime scene.Liquid chromatography is a powerful analytical tool for organic compound analysis.Recently,high-performance liquid chromatography(HPLC)has proven to be an efficient method for forensic soil analysis,especially in discriminating soils from proximity locations.However,ultra-performance liquid chromatography(UPLC),which is much more sensitive than HPLC,has never been explored in this context.This study proposed a UPLC method for profiling non-volatile organic compounds in three Malaysian soils(red,brown and yellowish-brown soils).The three soils were analysed separately to assess the effects of individual chromatographic parameters:(a)elution programme(isocratic vs.two gradient programmes);(b)flow rate(0.1 vs.0.2 mL/min);(c)extraction solvent(acetonitrile vs.methanol)and(d)detection wavelength(230 vs.254 nm).The injection volume and total run time were set to 5μL and 35 min,respectively.Consequently,each soil sample gave 24 different chromatograms.Results showed that the most desirable chromatographic parameters were(a)isocratic elution;(b)flow rate at 0.2 mL/min and(c)acetonitrile extraction solvent.The proposed UPLC system is expected to be a feasible method for profiling non-volatile organic compounds in soil,and is more chemical-efficient than a comparable HPLC system.展开更多
基金The work was supported by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia(UKM),CRIM under Grant GUP-2020-085.
文摘Soil is of particular interest to the forensic community because it can be used as valuable associative evidence to link a suspect to a victim or a crime scene.Liquid chromatography is a powerful analytical tool for organic compound analysis.Recently,high-performance liquid chromatography(HPLC)has proven to be an efficient method for forensic soil analysis,especially in discriminating soils from proximity locations.However,ultra-performance liquid chromatography(UPLC),which is much more sensitive than HPLC,has never been explored in this context.This study proposed a UPLC method for profiling non-volatile organic compounds in three Malaysian soils(red,brown and yellowish-brown soils).The three soils were analysed separately to assess the effects of individual chromatographic parameters:(a)elution programme(isocratic vs.two gradient programmes);(b)flow rate(0.1 vs.0.2 mL/min);(c)extraction solvent(acetonitrile vs.methanol)and(d)detection wavelength(230 vs.254 nm).The injection volume and total run time were set to 5μL and 35 min,respectively.Consequently,each soil sample gave 24 different chromatograms.Results showed that the most desirable chromatographic parameters were(a)isocratic elution;(b)flow rate at 0.2 mL/min and(c)acetonitrile extraction solvent.The proposed UPLC system is expected to be a feasible method for profiling non-volatile organic compounds in soil,and is more chemical-efficient than a comparable HPLC system.
