ION MOBILITY – MASS SPECTROMETRY AS A NEW APPROACH FOR THE SCREENING OF PESTICIDE RESIDUES IN FOOD

Pesticide residue analysis requires methods that can determine hundreds of compounds at low levels in complex food matrices. This challenge has given rise to multi residue methods, the only efficient analytical approach.
This type of analytical method entails a “generic” extraction followed by a soft or no purification step to avoid any analytes looses. With over a 1000 active compounds with different physical chemical properties, gas and liquid chromatography are used as complementary separative techniques.
In the past decade, the determination has been performed on tandem mass analyzers, a powerful tool to overcome co-eluting compounds with excellent sensitivity. Nevertheless, these instruments can guarantee these results per acquisition cycles for more or less 150 compounds. This represents a serious limitation when the number of pesticides to be sought for monitoring and MRL enforcement is growing each year. As multiple injections from the same sample are not viable for laboratories, alternative options have to be explored. We propose the investigation of ion mobility (IM) coupled with mass spectrometry as a new approach for pesticide residue analysis in food.