Hazardous migrants from food contact materials by in vitro as well as planar bioassays and high-resolution mass spectrometry

Food contact materials may contain thousands of chemicals that can migrate into food and be absorbed by consumers. Current target analysis overlooks unknown hazardous substances without any toxicological data. Thus, non-target effect-directed strategies were developed and applied to six migrates for potentially adverse effects on human health. Four coffee-to-go cups and two meal-to-go boxes were analyzed for endocrine-active, cytotoxic, genotoxic, and dioxin-like migrants by in vitro and planar bioassays. Cytotoxic, genotoxic and endocrine-active substances migrated from the polyethylene-coated cellulose-based coffee-to-go cups, and additionally, dioxin-like, genotoxic and estrogenic substances from the cellulose-based meal-to-go boxes. Via the S9 liver enzyme system, both metabolic activation and deactivation were observed. High-performance thin-layer chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry, followed by co-analysis of candidates, identified five prioritized compound zones to be the estrogenic 2,5-dihydroxycyclohexa-2,5-diene-1,4-dione, 4-octylphenol, and dibutyl phthalate, cytotoxic (hydroxyethyl) methacrylate, and genotoxic 1,6-hexanediol dimethacrylate. Two detected perfluorotelomers were of low concern.