6PPD-Quinone: Revised Toxicity Assessment and Quantification with a Commercial Standard

Stormwater exposure can cause acute mortality of coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch), and 6PPD-quinone (6PPD-Q) was identified as the primary causal toxicant. Commercial standards of 6PPDQ recently became available; their analysis highlighted a systematic high bias in prior reporting concerning 6PPD-Q. A 6PPD-Q commercial standard was used to re-confirm toxicity estimates in juvenile coho salmon and develop a liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry analytical method for quantification. Peak area responses of the commercial standard were similar to 15 times higher than those of in-house standards, and the updated LC50 value (95 ng/L) was similar to 8.3-fold lower than that previously reported. These data support prior relative comparisons of the occurrence and toxicity while confirming the substantial lethality of 6PPD-Q. While environmental concentrations are expected to be lower, 6PPD-Q also was more toxic than previously calculated and should be categorized as a "very highly toxic" pollutant for aquatic organisms. Isotope dilution-tandem mass spectrometry methods enabled accurate quantification (limits of quantification of <10 ng/L) within environmental samples.