Residue determination of glufosinate in plant origin foods using modified Quick Polar Pesticides (QuPPe) method and liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry

•Modified QuPPe method was used for extraction of glufosinate in selected matrices.•MWCNTs was used for the purification of the extract, much better than PSA.•The sample extract was derivatized with 10 g/L FMOC-Cl at 40 °C for an hour.•Glufosinate-FMOC was detected by LC–MS/MS.

A sensitive and specific method for the determination of glufosinate in plant origin foods was developed. The method involves extraction using modified QuPPe method, clean-up by multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs), derivatization with 9-fluorenylmethyl chloroformate (FMOC-Cl) and detection with liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry (LC–MS/MS). The method was validated on twelve matrices spiked at 10 or 20, 100 and 500 μg/kg. The recovery ranged from 80% to 108% with intra-day RSDs (n = 5) of 0.6–9.8% and inter-day RSDs (n = 15) of 3.0–9.4%. Good linearities (R2 ⩾ 0.9991) were obtained for all matrices. The limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) for the selected matrices ranged from 0.3 to 3.3 μg kg−1 and from 1 to 10 μg kg−1, respectively. The method was demonstrated to be reliable and sensitive for the routine monitoring of glufosinate in plant origin foods.