Analysis of pesticide residues in olive oil and other vegetable oils

Pesticide residue analysis in olive oil presents difficulties due to the high amount of co-eluted compounds resulting in high matrix effect. Different extraction/clean-up methods including gel permeation chromatography, liquid/liquid extraction, solid-phase extraction and other extraction methods are applied to overcome these difficulties. Recent approaches such as the addition of the freezing-out step and the application of Enhanced Matrix Removal-Lipid sorbent (EMR-Lipid) are reported. Gas chromatography and liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry are considered the gold standard technologies covering a wide scope of pesticides. This review recapitulates the methods most widely used for the determination of pesticide residues in vegetable oils. As a continuation of previous reviews, the work conducted is an update review of methods from 2006 in this field, evaluating their strengths and limitations. Main analytical parameters of the different extraction procedures and detection methods are discussed in terms of recoveries, robustness, limit of quantification, and matrix effect.