The role of methanol addition to water samples in reducing analyte adsorption and matrix effects in liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry

Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) analysis coupled simply with water filtering before injection has proven to be a simple, economic and time-saving method for analyzing trace-level organic pollutants in aqueous environments. However, the linearity, precision and detection limits of such methods for late-eluting analytes were found to be much poorer than for early-eluting ones due to adsorption of the analytes in the operating system, such as sample vial, flow path and sample loop, creating problems in quantitative analysis. Addition of methanol (MeOH) into water samples as a modifier was shown to be effective in alleviating or even eliminating the negative effect on signal intensity for the late-eluting analytes and at the same time being able to reduce certain matrix effects for real water samples. Based on the maximum detection signal intensity obtained on desorption of the analytes with MeOH addition, the ratio of the detection signal intensity without addition of MeOH to the maximum intensity can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of methanol addition. Accordingly, the values of <50%, 50-80%, 80-120% could be used to indicate strong, medium and no effects, respectively. Based on this concept, an external matrix-matched calibration method with the addition of MeOH has been successfully established for analyzing fifteen pesticides with diverse physico-chemical properties in surface and groundwater with good linearity (r2: 0.9929-0.9996), precision (intra-day relative standard deviation (RSD): 1.4-10.7%, inter-day RSD: 1.5-9.4%), accuracy (76.9-126.7%) and low limits of detection (0.003-0.028 μg/L).