Analysis of Atrazine and Its Degradation Products in Water by Tandem High-Performance Immunoaffinity Chromatography and Reversed-Phase Liquid Chromatography

Atrazine is one of the most widely used herbicides in agriculture. This work examines the development of an automated Chromatographic immunoassay method for water samples that provides quantitative information on both atrazine and its main degradation products (hydroxyatrazine, deethylatrazine and deisopropylatrazine). This method is based on the combined use of a high-performance immunoaffinity column, which contains immobilized antibodies capable of extracting these compounds from water, and a reversed-phase column, for separation of the various extracted solutes. The design and optimization of this method is discussed and data are presented concerning its performance in the routine analysis of environmental samples. This technique gives good correlation versus GC methods, while allowing for the direct analysis of samples in the ppb range in as little as 12 min.