Abstract:

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are present ubiquitously in the environment and exposure to PAHs is a major environmental and occupational health problem. One important approach in assessing human exposure to PAHs is to measure 1-hydroxypyrene excreted in urine. Its present analytical methods require either chromatographic separation^[1] or solvent extracting^[2]. Matrix isopotential synchronous fluorescence spectroscopy (MISFS) is a new fluorimetric technique which consists of performing synchronous scans through a trajectory joining points of equal intensity on a total fluorescence spectrum^[3]. The technique is very useful for resolving highly-spectrally-overlapped mixtures or detecting analytes in complex fluorescent background without the need for tedious prior separation.