Recent Progress in Determination of Microcystins in Aquatic Environments

Microcystins are common cyanobacterial toxins with strong toxicity to renal and hepatic nervous system. Due to the eutrophication of water, cyanobacteria will burst and produce large amounts of microcystins, posing a huge menace to aquatic organisms and people who eat them. With the advance of methods concentration and enrichment, separation and quantification, and instrument technology, quantitative methods for microcystins analysis have been improved and applied more and more widely. In the present study, the enrichment, detection and analysis methods of microcystins in water, sediments and organisms are reviewed. The results showed that the current common sampling method is an active sampling method. So the development of a simple, reliable and practical passive sampling method is one of the urgently needed research directions. Derivatizing method can reduce matrix effect and is conducive to the use of different detection methods and experimental observation. Therefore, the development of an efficient and sensitive derivatizing method for the detection of microcystins would be one of the important research methods.