Evaluation of settled floor dust for the presence of microbial metabolites and volatile anthropogenic chemicals in indoor environments by LC–MS/MS and GC–MS methods

This study reports on detection of a large number of biological and anthropogenic pollutants using LC–MS/MS and GC–MS technologies in settled floor dust (SFD). The latter technique was applied to obtain a general picture on the presence of microbial as well as non-microbial volatile organic compounds, whereas the targeted LC–MS/MS analysis focused on identification of species specific secondary metabolites. In the absence of moisture monitoring data the relevance of finding of stachybotrylactam and other metabolites of tertiary colonizers are confined only to accidental direct exposure to SFD. To the best of our knowledge 30 of the 71 identified volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are newly reported in SFD matrix. Coordinated application of “AMDIS and Spectconnect” was found beneficial for the evaluation and identification of prime volatile pollutants in complex environmental samples. Principal component analysis (PCA) of peak areas of 18 microbial volatile organic compounds (MVOCs) resulted in identification of nonanal as potential MVOC marker. Two more volatiles toluene and 1-tetradecanol though had discriminative influence, are not regarded as MVOC markers, considering their probable alternate origin from paints and cosmetics, respectively.