Development of a multi-residue screening method for the determination of pesticides in cereals and dry animal feed using gas chromatography–triple quadrupole tandem mass spectrometry

A multi-residue screening method for simultaneous analysis of 122 gas chromatography amenable pesticides in dry matrices such as cereal grain and certain feedingstuffs was developed. The method entails a simple extraction of re-hydrated sample with acetonitrile followed by a dispersive solid phase extraction (dispersive-SPE) clean-up step prior to the final determination by gas chromatography/triple quadrupole tandem mass spectrometry (GC–MS/MS). Due to complexity of analyzed matrices, two MS/MS transitions were set for each pesticide to eliminate the need for re-analysis of potentially positive samples, and provide unequivocal identification of detected pesticides in accordance with recent guidelines, in a single analytical run. Thus, in the developed GC–MS/MS acquisition method, a total of 216 different multiple reactions monitoring (MRM) transitions were monitored in one set of experimental conditions. To evaluate performance of the method, validation experiments were carried out on wheat grain at three spiking levels (0.01, 0.02 and 0.05 mg kg−1). Additional recovery tests at 0.05 mg kg−1 were carried out on several other matrices. The recoveries ranged between 73 and 129% with associated relative standard deviations between 1 and 29% for the majority of pesticides. Limits of detection were less or equal to 0.01 mg kg−1 for approximately 68% of pesticides. The applicability of the proposed method to detect and quantify pesticide residues has been demonstrated in the analysis of 136 real samples. Additionally, the method was favorably compared with an acetone extraction method (accepted as a reference method by some of European and U.S. authorities) in the analysis of real samples known to contain pesticide residues.