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Organic Microcontaminants in Tomato Crops Irrigated with Reclaimed Water Grown under Field Conditions: Occurrence, Uptake, and Health Risk Assessment

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posted on 2019-05-31, 00:00 authored by Ana B. Martínez-Piernas, Patricia Plaza-Bolaños, Pilar Fernández-Ibáñez, Ana Agüera
In many regions, reuse of reclaimed water (RW) is a necessity for irrigation. The presence of organic microcontaminants (OMCs) in RW and their translocation to plants may represent a risk of human exposure. Nevertheless, information available about real field crops is scarce and focused on a limited number of compounds. The novelty of this work relies on the application of a wider-scope analytical approach based on a multianalyte target analysis (60 compounds) and a suspect screening (>1300 compounds). This methodology was applied to real field-grown tomato crops irrigated with RW. The study revealed the presence of 17 OMCs in leaves (0.04–32 ng g–1) and 8 in fruits (0.01–1.1 ng g–1), 5 of them not reported before in real field samples. A health-risk assessment, based on the toxicological threshold concern (TTC) concept, showed that RW irrigation applied under the conditions given does not pose any threat to humans.

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