Non-Targeted Analyses for Pesticides Using Deconvolution, Accurate Masses, and Databases – Screening and Confirmation

Technical innovations in crop protection have been a key component in the globalization of food production and distribution over the past several decades. The ease of access to foodstuffs from distant growing regions has depended, to a large extent, on the new pesticides that combat the historic foes of food sufficiency: fungi, insects, and weeds. Yet the same public that has come to expect and demand the ready availability of food products also has high expectations of regulators to ensure the safety of their food supply. Regulators in the United States, Europe, and Asia have, therefore, had to grapple with the task of ensuring that exposure levels to agricultural chemicals in the food supply remain within strictly determined parameters. In each region, regulatory agencies have, during the past decade, produced pesticide regulations that are increasingly stringent both in terms of the number of pesticides tracked and the allowable tolerances of those pesticides in the food supply. Because over a thousand pesticides are used globally to protect crops and improve food production, regulatory stringency translates into new challenges for the refinement of residue data generation and analysis. Because pesticide contamination of foodstuffs and environmental matrices could provide significant risk to consumers, vigilant monitoring is required; but the number of targeted and non-targeted pesticides that must be monitored in a given global region has risen significantly. Therefore, simple, rapid methods for screening hundreds of pesticides at trace levels in various matrices must be established. The widely divergent chemical properties (polarity, thermal stability, etc.) of these non-targeted pesticides call for the application of different analytical methods. Both GC and LC approaches are available, with each using a different technique for data analysis.