Enantioselective determination of triazole fungicide epoxiconazole bioaccumulation in tubifex based on HPLC-MS/MS.

In this study, the enantioselective bioaccumulation of epoxiconazole enantiomers in tubifex (Oligochaeta, Tubificida) was investigated in two uptake pathways. A sensitive and rapid chiral method was developed for the determination of epoxiconazole enantiomers in tubifex and soil based on high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with triple-quadrupole mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS). In the spiked-water or spiked-soil treatments, enantioselective bioaccumulation of epoxiconazole in tubifex was obersved. For spiked-water treatment, (-)-epoxiconazole accumulated in tubifex to a greater extent than (+)-epoxiconazole, leading to enrichments with a composition (-) > (+). However, for spiked-soil treatment, the enantioselectivity in tubifex was reversed with a preferential accumulation of (+)-epoxiconazole. Calculated accumulation factors (AFs) indicated that epoxiconazole in spiked-water treatment had higher bioaccumulation potential than that in spiked-soil treatment. The results from the spiked-soil treatment also revealed that the dissipation of epoxiconazole in soil was enantioselective, and tubifex has positive effects on epoxiconazole diffusion from soil to overlying water.