Determination of monosaccharides hydrolyzed from polysaccharides in activated sludge by ion chromatography-mass spectrometry with online pretreatment of column switching technique.

The simultaneous determination of monosaccharides present in the activated sludge would be crucial to understand the water treatment mechanism. Herein, an ion chromatography-mass spectrometry (IC-MS) with online pretreatment of column switching technique was proposed to analyze monosaccharides hydrolyzed from extracellular polysaccharides in the activated sludge. When the matrix was eliminated in the first dimension, monosaccharides were immediately identified by IC-MS. The improved ionization efficiency was achieved with the addition of T-joint prior to MS. During the performance test, our established method showed excellent detection limits ranging from 0.34 to 2.15 μg/L for all sugar targets. Great linearity (R ≥ 0.9955) was also achieved using this method in the range from 0.01 to 5 mg/L. Furthermore, the average recoveries were obtained between 84.82 and 113.46%. RSDs for peak areas and retention times were determined as 3.76% and 0.27%, respectively. Finally, this approach provided a rapid, convenient, and practical determination of monosaccharides in the activated sludge, which would be helpful for the analysis of monosaccharides derived from other biological samples.