Marker compound system study

A huge proportion of the presented investigations used organic marker compounds in order to differentiate the various anthropogenic emissions to the river and groundwater systems. The studies are not restricted to the application of established marker compounds, but numerous new marker substances were introduced and evaluated. 

The main focus of this study was to identify organic substances in Havel and Spree river sediments that could trace anthropogenic emissions of specific sources within the system. Therefore, selected contaminants with respect to their source specificity and to their environmental stability are discussed in order to characterize new potential anthropogenic marker compounds. 

Tandem mass spectrometry (i.e., MS-MS) is another technique that has recently become popular for the direct analysis of individual molecular markers in complex organic mixtures [87,505,509,578 - 583]. This technique provides a rapid method for the direct analysis of specific classes of molecular markers in whole sample extracts. In this approach the system is set up to monitor the parent ions responsible for a specific daughter ion as described above and the distribution of parent ions obtained under these conditions should provide the same information as previously obtained by GC-MS [505, 582]. Even greater specificity can be achieved by a combination of GC-MS-MS [516,584]. In view of the complexity of COM samples and the need to detect the presence of individual organic compounds or classes of compounds, it would seem that MS-MS, especially coupled with GC, would be extremely valuable in future environmental organic geochemistry studies. 

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