Postdoctoral Associate, Abuzar Kabir, developed an extraction technique called, Fabric Phase Sorptive Extraction (FPSE), to try to solve some of the problems inherent in solid-phase extraction. Now, he is working with scientists around the world with this method to solve issues such as extracting pesticides from wine and detecting polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in water.
Kabir first led a team of scientists from the U.S. and Spain to help determine the amount of pesticides in a glass of wine using FPSE.
Like any agricultural crop, grape vines are sprayed with pesticides, especially fungicides and insecticides, to protect the fruit. Most of these pesticides are washed off the grapes before fermentation, but some do make their way into the wine. Determining how much pesticides the wine contains has been difficult to prove because of the wine’s natural complexity.
Kabir and his colleagues used their FPSE technique to test nine wines: five white and four red. They found that all the wines contained pesticides, each with different numbers of compounds ranging from two to nine, but they were all safe to drink and caused no harm.
For more information on how Kabir and his team extracted pesticides from wine, read the full article by Jon Evans.
For the next experiment, a group of Chinese researchers integrated Kabir’s method to ion mobility spectrometry for rapid on-site monitoring of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons – a class of chemicals that occur naturally in coal,
crude oil and gasoline – in aquatic environment.
The contamination of water is a high risk to human health, so there is an urgent need to rapidly detect water pollution in the field.
This is a new milestone for FPSE, as the article opens up new opportunities in airport security, illicit drug monitoring and many other analytical and forensic field investigations.
To learn more on how FPSE was efficient on monitoring on-site water quality, view the full abstract.
