Polymer for accumulating organic compounds

Synthetic Polymers for Accumulating Organic Compounds from Water... 

The use of synthetic polymers and bonded phases to accumulate organic compounds from water for subsequent analytical and/or bioassay applications is summarized in this section. 

Synthetic polymers are homogeneous, and in 1969, Riley and Taylor (76) were the first to report the use of a styrene-divinylbenzene polymer, distributed by Rohm and Haas as XAD-1 of their Amberlite XAD series, to accumulate a variety of organic compounds from different test waters. This same polymer had been used earlier, in 1968, by Bradlow (77) for the determination of drugs in urine. 

High-surface-area polymers can be used to accumulate large amounts of relatively insoluble organic compounds from very large volumes of water. In the adsorption step of the accumulation, the more soluble components are not recovered efficiently so that the accumulated solutes do not accurately reflect the proportions of different compounds present at trace levels in the water. Nevertheless, the very simple polymer approach can be used for many studies because the mutagenicity appears to reside in the hydrophobic fraction that the polymers accumulate efficiently. This conclusion is based on favorable bioassay comparison of the extracts accumulated by the XAD-2 method and the extracts collected by the more complicated and expensive freeze concentration method (216, 233). 

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