Is nontarget screening of emerging contaminants by LC-HRMS successful? A plea for compound libraries and computer tools

This review focuses on the possibilities and limits of nontarget screening of emerging contaminants, with emphasis on recent applications and developments in data evaluation and compound identification by liquid chromatography–high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS). The general workflow includes determination of the elemental composition from accurate mass, a further search for the molecular formula in compound libraries or general chemical databases, and a ranking of the proposed structures using further information, e.g., from mass spectrometry (MS) fragmentation and retention times. The success of nontarget screening is in some way limited to the preselection of relevant compounds from a large data set. Recently developed approaches show that statistical analysis in combination with suspect and nontarget screening are useful methods to preselect relevant compounds. Currently, the unequivocal identification of unknowns still requires information from an authentic standard which has to be measured or is already available in user-defined MS/MS reference databases or libraries containing HRMS spectral information and retention times. In this context, we discuss the advantages and future needs of publicly available MS and MS/MS reference databases and libraries which have mostly been created for the metabolomic field. A big step forward has been achieved with computer-based tools when no MS library or MS database entry is found for a compound. The numerous search results from a large chemical database can be condensed to only a few by in silico fragmentation. This has been demonstrated for selected compounds and metabolites in recent publications. Still, only very few compounds have been identified or tentatively identified in environmental samples by nontarget screening. The availability of comprehensive MS libraries with a focus on environmental contaminants would tremendously improve the situation.