Pressurized Liquid Extraction of Organochlorine Pesticides from Certified Solid Materials

Development, validation, and uncertainty measurement of multi-residue analysis of organochlorine and organophosphorus pesticides using pressurized liquid extraction and dispersive-SPE techniques

Simple and efficient multi-residue analytical methods were developed and validated for the determination of 13 organochlorine and 17 organophosphorous pesticides from soil, spinach and eggplant. Techniques namely accelerated solvent extraction and dispersive SPE were used for sample preparations. The recovery studies were carried out by spiking the samples at three concentration levels (1 limit of quantification (LOQ), 5 LOQ, and 10 LOQ). The methods were subjected to a thorough validation procedure. The mean recovery for soil, spinach and eggplant were in the range of 70-120% with median CV (%) below 10%. The total uncertainty was evaluated taking four main independent sources viz., weighing, purity of the standard, GC calibration curve and repeatability under consideration. The expanded uncertainty was well below 10% for most of the pesticides and the rest fell in the range of 10-20%.

Development of a sample preparation method for the analysis of current-use pesticides in sediment using gas chromatography

Pyrethroid insecticides have been implicated as the cause of sediment toxicity to Hyalella azteca in both agricultural and urban areas of California; however, for a subset of these toxic sediments (approximately 30%), the cause of toxicity remains unidentified. This article describes the analytical method development for seven additional pesticides that are being examined to determine if they might play a role in the unexplained toxicity. A pressurized liquid extraction method was optimized to simultaneously extract diazinon, methyl parathion, oxyfluorfen, dicofol, fenpropathrin, pyraclostrobin, and indoxacarb from sediment, and the extracts were cleaned using a two-step solid-phase extraction procedure. The final extract was analyzed for the target pesticides by gas chromatography/nitrogen-phosphorus detector (GC/NPD), and gas chromatography/electron capture detector (GC/ECD), after sulfur was removed by shaking with copper and cold crystallization. Three sediments were used as reference matrices to assess method accuracy and precision. Method detection limits were 0.23-1.8 ng/g dry sediment using seven replicates of sediment spiked at 1.0 ng/g dry sediment. Recoveries ranged from 61.6 to 118% with relative standard deviations of 2.1-17% when spiked at 5.0 and 50 ng/g dry sediment. The three reference sediments, spiked with 50 ng/g dry weight of the pesticide mixture, were aged for 0.25, 1, 4, 7, and 14 days. Recoveries of the pesticides in the sediments generally decreased with increased aging time, but the magnitude of the decline was pesticide and sediment dependent. The developed method was applied to field-collected sediments from the Central Valley of California.