Fluorescence techniques for the determination of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in marine environment: an overview

Abstract

Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) arecompounds of great environmental interestbecause of their potential carcinogenic andmutagenic activity and their frequent occurrencein the environment, above all in the marine envi-ronment. Therefore it is an important to establishsimple, sensitive and reliable methods for thedetermination of these compounds. In this workwe report an overview on the application of flu-orescence techniques to the study and determi-nation of PAHs in marine samples: water,sediments and organisms. Conventional fluores-cence spectroscopy, synchronous fluorescencespectroscopy, Shpol ́skii fluorescence spec-troscopy and high performance liquid chro-matography (HPLC) with fluorescence detectionconstitute the most interesting analytical tech-niques for the determination of these pollutants.