Analysis of pesticide residues in tuber crops using pressurised liquid extraction and gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry

- A unique high throughput multiresidue analysis method for 150 pesticides in tuber matrices.
- Pressurized liquid extraction provided rapid, exhaustive and semi-automatic sample preparation.
- The optimized rapid GC-MS/MS method offered selective and sensitive analysis with LOQs of 0.1-10 ng/g.
- The method was equivalent to conventional QuEChERS-based methods in terms of sensitivity and throughput.

Tuber crops substantially contribute to the food security in the developing countries. Often, their cultivation involves unregulated applications of pesticides, leading to MRL non-compliances. Despite their rising currency in international trade, there exist scarcely any methods for pesticide residue analysis in these matrices. Therefore, we developed a multi-residue method for simultaneous analysis of a diverse range of pesticides in tuber crops, based on pressurized liquid extraction by ethyl acetate, followed by selective identification and quantification of the residues using GC-MS selected reaction monitoring. The method was evaluated for 150 pesticides. Results showed that their limits of quantification were 0.1-10 ng/g, with recoveries of 70-120%. When compared to the conventional analytical techniques, such as QuEChERS and buffered ethyl acetate extraction, this method provided superior performance in terms of precision, and recovery of the spiked and incurred residues with similar productivity. The method holds promise for commercial and regulatory residue analysis.