Defining the Retention Times of 209 PCB Congeners Using GCxGC-TOFMS

This application poster describes the use of a GCxGC-TOFMS instrument to determine the primary retention time and secondary retention time for each of the 209 PCB congeners. In addition, a user library with the mass spectra of each congener was created in order to see how successful the ChromaTOF software would be in appropriately labeling critical pair congeners, which are the most difficult congener pairs to separate. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are one of the most widely recognized persistent organic environmental pollutants. Because the molecular structures of the 209 PCB congeners are very similar to one another, they have been a challenge to completely separate using one-dimensional gas chromatography.