Determination of the most informative chemical elements for discrimination of rice samples according to the producing region.

Several approaches to assess the authenticity of food products have been developed, given that fraudulent products may impact consumers' confidence, affect commercial trades and lead to health risks. This paper proposes an approach to identify the chemical elements that optimally discriminate rice samples according to their producing region in the South of Brazil, the largest rice producer outside Asia. A combinatorial procedure on the concentration of 26 elements determined using inductively coupled mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and liquid chromatography hyphenated with ICP-MS from 640 rice samples was coupled with Support Vector Machine. The assessed elements included nonmetal and metal elements of 3 types of rice collected from 5 rice-producing regions. The framework selected Mn, Fe, Cu, Zn, Ni, Mo, Cd, Cs, As, Rb, Se, and iAs as the most informative elements for tracking samples' origin. The concentration of such elements is strongly affected by fertilization procedures and soil composition.

Pharmaceuticals, pesticides and metals/metalloids in Lake Guaíba in Southern Brazil: Spatial and temporal evaluation and a chemometrics approach.

Compiling and reporting data related to the presence of pharmaceuticals and pesticides are crucial means of assessing the risk those chemicals pose to human health and environment. Data sets from different sources were combined using a data fusion approach to produce a spatial and temporal variation of contaminants presents in water from Lake Guaíba (29°55'-30°24' S; 51°01'-51°20' W). Lake Guaíba is a 496 km2 water body situated in the geological depression of Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil; that is fed by several rivers from the metropolitan area, the 5th largest metro area in Brazil, with approximately 5 million inhabitants. Analytical methodology to quantify pharmaceuticals and pesticides by LC-QTOF-MS and GC-MS/MS was validated for 41 pharmaceutical and 62 pesticides. Furthermore, 27 chemical elements were analyzed by ICP-MS, and physical chemical parameters were determined using established methodologies. All validation parameters were in accordance with the National Institute of Metrology, Standardization, and Industrial Quality. Thirty-five water samples were analyzed from January to August 2019, and 15 pharmaceuticals and 25 pesticides were present in concentrations ranging from 6.00 ng L-1 to 580.00 ng L-1. Twenty-seven elements were analyzed during the same period, and 18 were present in concentrations ranging from 0.2 µg L-1 to 7060 µg L-1. Samples were tagged according to the points and months of collection to identify temporal and spatial patterns. The main findings show that the compounds are distributed throughout the studied area without an apparent regular pattern, suggesting that events in a specific point affect the entire ecosystem. Conversely, temporal variations were well defined, as samples were grouped according to the climatic conditions of the months of collection. Considering the calculated quotient risks, atrazine, cyproconazole, diuron, and simazine showed the highest risk levels for algae; acetaminophen, diclofenac, and ibuprofen showed the highest risk levels for aquatics invertebrates.