High-Efficiency Effect-Directed Analysis Leveraging Five High Level Advancements: A Critical Review

Organic contaminants are ubiquitous in the environment,
with mounting
evidence unequivocally connecting them to aquatic toxicity, illness,
and increased mortality, underscoring their substantial impacts on
ecological security and environmental health. The intricate composition
of sample mixtures and uncertain physicochemical features of potential
toxic substances pose challenges to identify key toxicants in environmental
samples. Effect-directed analysis (EDA), establishing a connection
between key toxicants found in environmental samples and associated
hazards, enables the identification of toxicants that can streamline
research efforts and inform management action. Nevertheless, the advancement
of EDA is constrained by the following factors: inadequate extraction
and fractionation of environmental samples, limited bioassay endpoints
and unknown linkage to higher order impacts, limited coverage of chemical
analysis (i.e., high-resolution mass spectrometry, HRMS), and lacking
effective linkage between bioassays and chemical analysis. This review
proposes five key advancements to enhance the efficiency of EDA in
addressing these challenges: (1) multiple adsorbents for comprehensive
coverage of chemical extraction, (2) high-resolution microfractionation
and multidimensional fractionation for refined fractionation, (3)
robust in vivo/vitro bioassays and omics, (4) high-performance
configurations for HRMS analysis, and (5) chemical-, data-, and knowledge-driven
approaches for streamlined toxicant identification and validation.
We envision that future EDA will integrate big data and artificial
intelligence based on the development of quantitative omics, cutting-edge
multidimensional microfractionation, and ultraperformance MS to identify
environmental hazard factors, serving for broader environmental governance.