About this Research Topic
Rapidly developing industry and wide human activities have consumed and produced increasing hazardous chemicals, which has caused the environmental pollutants to dramatically be increased. Nowadays, environmental pollution has become one of the greatest difficulties and objections that the world is suffering due to a serious detrimental impact on the water consumable resource, air, soil quality, and subsequently human and animal health. Hence, the quantification and determination of environmental pollutants at trace level is the most practical first step for identifying various managing strategies to control environmental pollution. In this regard, great efforts have been devoted to promoting recognition selectivity and detection sensitivity.
Despite the impressive advances of instrumental technology namely hyphenated techniques, it suffers from vital limitations such as low detection limit and inability to direct analysis of crude complex samples that need to overcome by influential sample preparation/pretreatment before instrumental analysis. Sample preparation plays an important role in the whole analytical procedure since it enriches the compounds of the target to enhance the sensitivity of the method and enables the cleanup of complex matrices to ride out the interferences. The principal goals of sample preparation/pretreatment are clean separation of the target analytes from the sample matrices and preconcentration of the analytes to the extent so that they can be recognizable for the instrument. Depending on the state of the samples (gas, liquid, solid, or semi-solid), and chemical/physical properties of target analytes, different sample preparation/pretreatment methods have been developed such as solid-phase based extraction, solvent-based extraction, membrane-based extraction, QuEChERS, etc. Recently, advanced functional materials such as stimuli-responsive molecularly imprinted polymers, metal-organic frameworks/covalent-organic frameworks (MOFs/COFs), bio-based composites, and nanoscale hybrid materials have been prepared and utilized to promote the sample preparation performance and implementing novel strategies in this old but vivid research field. In parallel, emerging upgraded sample preparation techniques led to trends of these techniques moving towards in terms of rapidity, simplification, atomization, miniaturization, and greener.
This Research Topic invites contributions, such as Original Research articles as well as Reviews, on the recent development and application advances of novel sample preparation materials and techniques for environmental analysis, as well as the related fields to the below topics:
- Preparation and modification of both natural and synthetic materials and their application in sample preparation.
- Development of hyphenated techniques such as liquid-liquid microextraction coupled with solid-phase extraction, solid-liquid phase microextraction, etc.
- Introduction of eco-friendly, fast, and cost-effectiveness approaches for identification and quantitative analysis of environmental pollutions.
- Fast sample preparation techniques.
- Special sampling and preparation techniques for some environmental samples.
- Preparation and determination of emerging contaminants in the environment.
- Computational modeling in all types of sample preparation methods.
- Novel instruments, software, and hardware with the aim of analytical analysis.
- Micro/nanofluidic based platforms of sample separation involved in micro total analytical techniques/lab on a chip LOC/point of care devices POC/NEMS or MEMS.
- OMICS analysis separation of macromolecules (nucleotides/epitopes/motifs/peptides/lipopolysaccharides) whole organisms or epitopes of disease threats (BWF) in air/water/soil.
Keywords: Sample Preparation, Environmental Analysis, Extraction Techniques, Advanced Functional Materials; Computational Approaches
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
