Magnetic “one-step” quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged and safe method for the fast determination of pesticide residues in freshly squeezed juice

• Published in: Journal of Chromatography A Vol. 1398; pp. 1 - 10
• Main Authors: Zheng, Hao-Bo, Ding, Jun, Zheng, Shu-Jian, Yu, Qiong-Wei, Yuan, Bi-Feng, Feng, Yu-Qi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier B.V 12.06.2015
• Subjects: Beverages - analysis; Food Analysis - methods; Freshly squeezed juice; Fruit - chemistry; Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry; Limit of Detection; Magnetic adsorbent; Magnetic Phenomena; Pesticide residue; Pesticide Residues - analysis; QuEChERS; Reproducibility of Results; Vegetables - chemistry; Magnetic adsorbent; Freshly squeezed juice; Pesticide residue; Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry; QuEChERS
• ISSN: 0021-9673; 1873-3778
• DOI: 10.1016/j.chroma.2015.04.021

•A magnetic “one-step” QuEChERS method was proposed.•Magnetic adsorbent was prepared via simple physical blending.•No centrifugation processes were required in the proposed method.•The proposed method was less time-consuming (within 3.5min).•The proposed method was fit for the high-throughput analysis. A “one-step” quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged and safe (QuEChERS) method was proposed for pesticide residue analysis in freshly squeezed juice of fruits and vegetables. In this method, a new magnetic adsorbent prepared by simple physical blending was adopt, which could endow the sample mixture with magnetic separability. To achieve the best performance of the modified QuEChERS towards target analytes, the amounts of adsorbents were investigated. Under the optimized conditions, a simple, rapid and sensitive method for the determination of 11 pesticide residues in freshly squeezed juice was established by coupling modified QuEChERS to gas chromatography/mass spectrometry analysis. The limits of quantification of the proposed method for 11 pesticides ranged from 2.0 to 49.6ng/g. Good linearities (R value ≥0.9993) were achieved at different concentration ranges, and acceptable method reproducibility was obtained by evaluating intra- and inter-day precisions with the relative standard deviations being less than 8.5% and 13.5%, respectively. The recoveries were in the range of 70.3–114.1% at different concentrations for real samples. Compared with the traditional QuEChERS methods, extraction/partitioning and purification were integrated into one step in the proposed method, which thus was time-saving (within 3.5min) with keeping good clean-up performance.