Food Testing Agriculture

Comprehensive LC/MS/MS Workflow of Pesticide Residues in Food Using the Agilent 6470 Triple Quadrupole LC/MS System

A comprehensive LC/MS/MS workflow was developed for the quantitation of 510 pesticide residues with the intention to accelerate and simplify routine laboratory food testing. Compound transitions and optimized parameters were developed based on the Agilent Pesticide Dynamic MRM Database, which has over 750 pesticides including curated parameters for fast and easy transfer into the analytical method. The workflow includes sample preparation, chromatographic separation, mass spectrometry (MS) detection, data analysis, and interpretation. The workflow applicability was demonstrated using an Agilent 1290 Infinity II LC system coupled to an Agilent 6470 triple quadrupole LC/MS on three food matrices with different content types: tomato (high water content), wheat (high starch content), and olive oil (high oil content). For sample preparation of the tomato and wheat samples, an Agilent QuEChERS kit was used with dSPE cleanup. Extraction was performed with the QuEChERS kit followed by Agilent Captiva EMR—Lipid cleanup for preparing olive oil samples