A mixture of the 9 pharmaceuticals was spiked at two con-centration levels: 500 g L−1for Roter Main upstream sediment and 200 g L−1 for Roter Main downstream and Gründlach sedi-ment. These initial concentrations were 3–4 orders of magnitud ehigher than typical levels in the environment to facilitate the detec-tion of TPs without any enrichment steps that would discriminatecertain compounds, especially potential TPs. Three types of con-trol experiments were conducted: (1) blank control (artificial riverwater and sediment, no addition of pharmaceuticals); (2) sterilecontrol; (3) water-only control. Sterile control incubations con-tained the same amount of pharmaceuticals, but the sediment wassterilized by autoclaving and sodium azide (NaN3) was added to the solution (final concentration: 1 g L−1) to maintain sterile condi-tions. The water-only control contained only artificial river water and pharmaceuticals, but no sediment. Details on the experimen-tal design and conditions are available as Supplementary Material(Tab. S2)