oa Single Step Extraction and Clean up Method for the Multiproxy Analysis of Biomarkers in Sediments and Aerosols

Organic biomarkers have proven their value as tools, among others, to reconstruct past environmental conditions, understand human impacts in the environment, and trace the transport pathways of the carbon cycle in sedimentary basins. For this reason, a wide variety of biomarkers (e.g. n-alkanes, C37 alkenones, GDGTs, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, n-alcohols and sterols) are routinely investigated and applied in the environmental and Earth sciences. However, current methodologies for the simultaneous analysis of an ensemble of compounds are labour intensive and time-consuming, which hamper the analysis of a large number of samples quickly and reliably.

Here, we present a modified analytical approach from standard techniques to quantify organic biomarkers in marine and lacustrine sediments and atmospheric aerosols. We use a Dionex™ ASE™ 350 device to perform extraction and fractionation in one single analytical step. This significantly reduces the time of the analysis, and increases reproducibility while also diminishing sample handling time.

This new approach provides faster and more reproducible quantification of a wide range of organic biomarkers in different types of environmental matrices, which significantly increases the efficiency of the analysis and allows the study of a large number of samples inexpensively while reducing solvent waste and handling time.