Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID MI_2023_Moran

Developing stable isotope fingerprinting LC-Orbitrap-MS method to investigate PFAS provenance, fate, and transport in water

Institute: Michigan
Year Established: 2023 Start Date: 2023-09-01 End Date: 2024-08-31
Total Federal Funds: $24,991 Total Non-Federal Funds: $24,954

Principal Investigators: James Moran

Project Summary: Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of persistent and toxic environmental contaminants threatening water resources and land use. PFAS include a wide array of chemical compounds (> 9000 PFAS), with different environmental behaviors and sources. Despite the large diversity of specific PFAS, significant achievement has been and continues to be made in quantifying their abundance in environmental, agricultural, and human samples. Building upon this, we seek to develop techniques to enable stable isotope fingerprinting of PFAS as an additional tool to inform contaminant provenance and PFAS environmental behavior. Unique features of many PFAS preclude the use of traditional methods for stable isotope evaluation. Thus, we propose analysis by Orbitrap mass spectrometry (Orbitrap MS) which would make (to the best of our knowledge) MSU the first to attempt this method and a leader in the field. Orbitrap MS has high potential to unlock the benefits of stable isotope analysis to strengthen the analytical toolbox for tracking PFAS sources, and study their fate, transport, and (potential) environmental transformation and remediation. Development of these methods targeting PFAS will provide the tools to tackle many related questions that we cannot currently address. Demonstration of the needed stable isotope methods will provide a foundation for future proposals and position MSU to take an additional leadership role in PFAS-related research.