Date of Award

Spring 2015

Document Type

Thesis

Terms of Use

© 2015 Martin T. Mathay. All rights reserved. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may only be used for non-commercial, educational, and research purposes. For all other uses, including reproduction and distribution, please contact the copyright holder.

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Chemistry & Biochemistry Department

First Advisor

Alison Holliday

Second Advisor

Amy Cheng Vollmer

Abstract

Triazole fungicides represent the largest class within sterol demethylation inhibitors. While their intended use is to kill fungi, their accumulation to large concentrations is detrimental to non-targeted species. The primary goal of this work was to develop and optimise a method to quantify the amount of triazole fungicides from solid agar media. This investigation is divided into three parts: a method validation dedicated to authenticate the trueness of an HLPC method used in the determination and quantification of the triazole fungicides epoxiconazole and myclobutanil and two sections dedicated to utilizing the HPLC method to evaluate the efficiency of developed extraction methods of epoxiconazole and myclobutanil from agar media. The validation method used to quantify the concentration of selected triazole fungicides was true. The development of a method that can quantify triazole fungicides from a sample is the most important prerequisite towards the investigation of their bioremediation. The second and third sections of this thesis aimed to find a rapid and easy method to extract epoxiconazole and myclobutanil from bacterial growth media. A matrix effect that deterred the extraction of the triazoles was observed. We were able to develop two separate methods, one for each triazole, which could reproducibly extract its target compound of interest at 90% or above. Finally, we attempted to detect epoxiconazole and myclobutanil by mass spectrometry, as opposed to UV-Vis, as this detection method is more sensitive in compound quantification. The results detailed in these developed methods can be extended for experimentation to identify bacterial species that can metabolise these compounds in order to establish a link between microbes and the biodegradation of triazole fungicides.

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