Determination of Heterocyclic Amines in Atmospheric Particles by Reversed Phase High Performance Liquid Chromatography

A method for the determination of heterocyclic amines (HAs) in atmospheric particles by reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography was developed. An ODS-C18 column (250 mm × 4.6 mm, 5 μm) was used at 30 °C. A solution containing a mixture of acetonitrile and 0.01 M triethylamine (pH = 4.0) was used as mobile phase at a flow rate of 1.0 ml min−1 with a nonlinear gradient elution program. The optimizing excitation and emission fluorescence wavelengths were determined with ultraviolet detection at 263 nm. The method realized the complete baseline separation of six HAs and high-sensitive fluorescence determination of four HAs. Instrument detection limits were 1.8–8.4 μg l−1 (fluorescence detection) and 0.093–0.609 mg l−1 (ultraviolet detection) (S/N = 3). The correlation coefficients were 0.9920–0.9999. The relative standard deviations were below 5.9% and the recoveries were 75.3%–111.6% with RSD of 1.7%–2.3%. The results indicate that this method is simple, rapid, and accurate, and it can be used for the determination of HAs in atmospheric particles.