Determination of Pesticides in Apples by High-Performance Liquid Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry (HPLC–MS) with High-Resolution Multiple Reaction Monitoring

Abstract

High-performance liquid chromatography/quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (HPLC/QTOF–MS) is reported for quantitative determination of pesticide residues in apples. After a simple, rapid extraction, 300 mg MgSO₄, 50 mg primary secondary amine (PSA), and 250 mg octadecyl (C₁₈) were used for sample clean-up to ensure efficient recovery. The pesticides were quantified by HPLC/QTOF–MS using high-resolution multiple reaction monitoring (HR-MRM). Matrix-matched external standard calibration was used for quantitative analysis. The developed method was validated by spiking blank samples with the analytes and provided satisfactory accuracy verified by recoveries from 78.9% to 109.4% and good precision (relative standard deviation ≤12.4%). The limits of quantification for all analytes were between 0.85 and 3.0 µg/kg. The method was successfully applied to the analysis of forty batches of real samples, demonstrating its effectiveness for routine application.

Keywords:

• High-performance liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS)
• high-resolution multiple reaction monitoring
• pesticide residues
• QuEChERS

Acknowledgments

This work was financially supported by the Project of Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province, China (2018CFB340).

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.