Abstract
The planetary boundary for novel entities (pollutants) has, according to the Stockholm Resilience Center, been transgressed because “the rate of chemical production and release into the environment far outpaces society’s capacity to assess and monitor their safety”, thus, putting the Earth’s system, and particularly vulnerable ocean ecosystems, at risk. Traditional environmental monitoring focuses exclusively on known and regulated substances, so there is a critical need for screening methods to assess the presence and impacts of unknown and unregulated chemical cocktails in the environment. Non-target screening (NTS) methods typically couples gas/liquid chromatography with high-resolution mass spectrometry (GC/LC-HRMS) and can detect thousands of unknown substances in environmental matrices, identify chemical patterns, suspect compounds and previously unrecognized pollutants. NTS can also be used to support retrospective analyses and investigations as new concerning compounds emerge. The utilisation of automated library searched for mass spectral deconvolution provided a list of tentative chemical identities with associated CAS numbers, where available. This may provide physico-chemical properties to be extracted – allowing toxicity databases to be utilised for further environmental parameter assessments.