Ultra-fast screening of pesticides in foods and agricultural products with desorption corona beam ionization (DCBI) tandem mass spectrometry

Pesticides screening in food sample has traditionally counted on analytical confirmation with a quantitative method such as GC/MS, HPLC and LC/MS. The chromatographic technique provide a high sensitivity and high reliability solution for pesticides analysis but introduce the relatively low throughput with time-consuming pretreatment technique. Desorption corona beam ionization (DCBI) source for direct analysis in mass spectrometry can work under ambient conditions with minimal sample pretreatments. In DCBI, a visible thin corona beam are generated from helium gas and impact the solid sample surface, and then the analyte molecules on the surface were ionized in the gas phase. DCBI was used in the field of drug development, environmental, homeland security. In this study, we attempted to develop a DCBI-MS approach to determine pesticides amount aiming at high throughput and comprehensive methods using MRM acquisition. Ambient mass spectrometry coupled with ultra-fast triple quadrupole mass spectrometry permits this data acquisition in 30 seconds per sample as compared with the conventional chromatographic run of about 20 - 40 minutes.