Scientists widely use the technique of mass spectroscopy to identify unknown molecules, including the forever chemicals known as PFAS.
Credit: S. Singha/Shutterstock
Stain-resistant clothing, fast-food wrappers, extreme weather gear such as certain jackets and pants — these products get many of their desirable features from a class of manufactured chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). But there’s a major downside: Researchers have found evidence that certain PFAS can potentially cause cancer and other serious health effects.
Governmental agencies and environmental organizations are increasingly monitoring PFAS, but there are thousands of different chemical structures of PFAS with only a small fraction that can be measured with high confidence.
“There is no single authority on what is PFAS or what makes up PFAS,” said NIST biologist Jared Ragland. “We know what a few hundred of them look like structurally, but there could be 9,000 or more possible different PFAS structures. It’s not a small problem.”
For example, a community may want to know if significant levels of PFAS are in a local lake used for fishing, so local officials send samples to a lab for testing. However, most PFAS aren’t in the suite of chemicals included for quantitative analysis, so the lab tests will miss them. In addition, the labs may have incomplete or outdated chemical data on PFAS. Due to the continual discovery of additional PFAS, it is difficult to maintain a central database that collects and organizes the scientific community’s knowledge about known and unknown PFAS chemical structures.
To address this issue, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a database that can help others identify and categorize PFAS in chemical ana ..
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