Simultaneous Synchronous Fluorescence Determination of Carbaryl, Propoxur, and Carbofuran with Multivariate Calibration Methods

Abstract

A synchronous fluorescence method for the determination of carbaryl (CAB), propoxur (PRO), and carbofuran (CAF) with the aid of multivariate calibration methods, such as classical least squares (CLS), principal component regression (PCR), and partial least squares (PLS), was proposed. Because the synchronous fluorescence spectra (SFS) of these three compounds are seriously overlapped, it is difficult to determine these compounds individually from their mixtures. In this work, the experimental conditions were investigated and optimized to obtain the high sensitivities and well‐defined waves for each analyte. Furthermore, chemometrics models were established from a set of known samples and were then applied to the prediction of these three pesticides in a set of validation samples with a relative prediction error (RPE_T) of around 4% and limits of detection of 0.50, 5.5, and 23 ng L⁻¹ for carbaryl, propoxur, and carbofuran, respectively. The proposed method was also successfully applied to determine the contents of these three compounds in spiked fruit and vegetable samples.

Keywords:

• Carbaryl
• carbofuran
• multivariate calibration methods
• propoxur
• synchronous fluorescence

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of this study by the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC20365002 and NSFC20562009), the State Key Laboratories of the Electroanalytical Chemistry of Changchun Applied Chemical Institute (SKLEAC2004‐3) and the Chemo/Biosensing and Chemometrics of Hunan University (SKLCBC2005‐22), the Jiangxi Province Natural Science Foundation (JXNSF0620041), the program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in Universities (IRT0540), and the Key Laboratory of Food Sciences of MOE of Nanchang University.