Development of EDA approaches for the identification of toxicants in different matrices

We develop and apply tailor-made EDA approaches to identify toxic components of environmental or technical mixtures of concern. This is done by solution-oriented integration of appropriate sampling approaches, biological effect detection and chemical analytical tools together with approaches to reduce sample complexity and to isolate fractions and compounds suspected to drive mixture toxicity. We distinguish two different EDA approaches: 

Virtual EDA is an approach to evaluate biotest and chemical analytical screening data with the goal to identify those chemicals that correlate with observed effects. Virtual EDA is done by multivariate analysis of effect and contamination patterns in larger numbers of samples for example from different sampling sites in a river or in a time series of samples from effluents with varying composition.

Higher tier EDA focuses on toxicant identification and unraveling of cause-effect relationships in individual samples by sequential combinations of biotesting, fractionation and chemical analysis. Main activities in this field are

• the development of large-volume on-site solid-phase extraction (LVSPE) tools
• the integration of novel high-throughput bioassays
• the development of targeted fractionation procedures
• the integration of novel workflows for non-target analysis in EDA procedures
• case studies of EDA in sediments, water and mixtures of transformation products