# Assessment of Bioactive Surfactant Levels in Selected Cereal Products
## 3 Results
### Discussion  
Extensive research on PFASs has highlighted their global distribution in environmental matrices and confirmed their impact on ecosystems and human health. Differences in the accumulation levels of PFAS in plants may depend on a number of factors. It is worth emphasizing the importance of environmental factors, such as emissions from industry, fertilization of soils with biosolids, quality of water used for irrigation, or application of pesticides. Moreover, compounds' physicochemical properties, such as carbon chain length, type of functional group, mobility related to water solubility, and sorption tendency, are significant. Additionally, the water transpiration rate from plant compartments and the protein and/or lipid content of plant tissues should not be neglected. Although the available literature is rather focused on PFAS analysis of raw crops such as wheat, maize, or oat, an additional search of existing publications was carried out to determine whether anything similar has been conducted previously. Unfortunately, this review of the literature concerning contamination of cereal-based products by PFAS did not provide much information. For this reason, some works related to cereals were reviewed to conduct an objective discussion. The uptake of PFAS from the environment into plant tissues and its transport within plant structures is mainly related to protein and lipid content due to the amphiphilic properties of these compounds [46, 47]. As cereals contain about 6-15% protein [11], the scientifically proven high affinity of PFAS to proteins may contribute to their accumulation in this kind of food. [PERSON] et al. 's study showed that tissue distribution of PFAS in plants was correlated with the protein transport process (root-to-shoot translocation) for both PFOA and PFOS [48]. This could be the result of an interaction between PFAS and fatty acid-binding proteins found in plants [49], as well as PFAS's strong association potential with soy peptone (plant protein) [50]. Thus, root uptake and the interaction with proteins may play a major role in PFAS accumulation in plant compartments [51]. Moreover, the diversity in translocation or uptake pathways of  
Figure 2: Dendrogram of cereal products data with hierarchical cluster analysis based on the Euclidean distance and the Ward linkage algorithm. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Group/Cluster** & **PFBA** & **PFPeA** & **PFhxA** & **FFOA** & **PFOS** \\ \hline
1 & 16.21 & 0.02 & 0.0002 & 0.07 & 0.25 \\
2 & 0.44 & - & 0.10 & 0.25 & 0.004 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular} All the PFAS values are shown in ng/g. Concentrations are displayed if higher than LOQ.  
\end{table} 
Table 5: Mean PFAS concentrations for the two principal product groups (determined from HCA). PFAS by different crop species may be due to the variability of the climatic parameters (specific to their cultivation) that affect the amount of water transpired from plants during growth [52]. As summarized in Table 2, there are considerable differences between the PFBA levels in the analyzed products. The mean concentration of PFBA calculated for wheat flour is ten times lower than that of rye flour, but PFBA levels identified for wheat bran are twice the level of those for rye bran. This might be caused by different water transpiration processes due to the blade construction of wheat and rye. [PERSON] et al. confirmed that PFAS accumulation rates in plant tissues are linked to chain length; these rates decrease as the number of carbon atoms in PFAS chains increases [53]. Moreover, [PERSON]'s research showed that PFAs have greater accumulation rates than PFSAs. The recent literature highlighted the relevance of the bioconcentration factor (BCF) with regard to plants' ability to accumulate pollutants [33]. PFBA has the highest BCF of the considered analytes, which may indicate the background of high PFBA concentrations in cereal-based products. Recently published data supported these conclusions. [PERSON] et al.