Determination of Hormone Antagonists in Waste-Water Samples by Micellar Electrokinetic Chromatography

The contamination of water represents a major problem in many parts of the world. Endocrine disrupting compounds belong to the water contaminants and affect, besides other things, hormonal equilibrium in the living organisms. Such compounds are of different chemical structures and there is a demand for their fast determination in water samples. In our work, we focused on the development of a simple and fast method for separation and determination of five model hormone antagonists, exemestane, toremifene, letrozole, anastrozole, and mifepristone, by micellar electrokinetic chromatography. Within the best conditions, 50 mM sodium borate pH 9.5, 50 mM SDS, 15% 1-propanol, 20 kV, the separation of all the compounds lasted 8 min. The method was successfully validated with LODs of 1.2–7.7 µg mL⁻¹, LOQs of 4.0–25.6 µg mL⁻¹ and intraday repeatability of peak areas of 0.8–1.1%. Moreover, it was applied to the analysis of spiked water samples from a local waste-water treatment plant using SPE as a pretreatment step.