Blooms of cyanobacteria represent a public health risk due to their cyanotoxins such as microcystins. Liquid chromatography techniques to separate and quantify microcystins invariably use acetonitrile as the organic component of the mobile phase. The price and availability of acetonitrile together with its elevated toxicity encourage the validation of acetonitrile-free methods of microcystin analysis. In this work, methanol was employed as the organic solvent of the mobile phase and the validation method was performed with different environmental water samples. The method showed limits of detection between 0.17 and 0.25 µg/L and of quantification between 0.55 and 0.82 µg/L for the microcystin variants: -RR, -YR, -LR, -LA.
microcystin; acetonitrile; methanol
