Atmospheric pressure gas chromatography quadrupole-time-of-flight mass spectrometry for simultaneous determination of fifteen organochlorine pesticides in soil and water

• The performances of soft ionization from atmospheric pressure gas chromatography source were evaluated.
• The advantages of two acquisition functions provided by QTOF mass spectrometry were discussed.
• Pretreatment methods for fifteen organochlorine pesticides in soil and water samples are optimized.

In this study, the application of atmospheric pressure gas chromatography quadrupole-time-of-flight mass spectrometry (APGC-QTOF-MS) has been investigated for simultaneous determination of fifteen organochlorine pesticides in soil and water. Soft ionization of atmospheric pressure gas chromatography was evaluated by comparing with traditional more energetic electron impact ionization (EI). APGC-QTOF-MS showed a sensitivity enhancement by approximately 7–305 times. The QuEChERs (Quick, Easy, Cheap, Effective, Rugged, and Safe) method was used to pretreat the soil samples and solid phase extraction (SPE) cleanup was used for water samples. Precision, accuracy and stability experiments were undertaken to evaluate the feasibility of the method. The results showed that the mean recoveries for all the pesticides from the soil samples were 70.3–118.9% with 0.4–18.3% intra-day relative standard deviations (RSD) and 1.0–15.6% inter-day RSD at 10, 50 and 500 μg/L levels, while the mean recoveries of water samples were 70.0–118.0% with 1.1–17.8% intra-day RSD and 0.5–12.2% inter-day RSD at 0.1, 0.5 and 1.0 μg/L levels. Excellent linearity (0.9931 ≦ r2 ≤ 0.9999) was obtained for each pesticides in the soil and water matrix calibration curves within the range of 0.01–1.0 mg/L. The limits of detection (LOD) for each of the 15 pesticides was less than 3.00 μg/L, while the limit of quantification (LOQ) was less than 9.99 μg/L in soil and water. Furthermore, the developed method was successfully applied to monitor the targeted pesticides in real soil and water samples.