Multi-residue analysis of pesticides in agricultural products using QuEChERS and SFC/MS

Analysis of pesticide residues in food is typically time-consuming due to the separation for multiple pesticides with a wide range of polarity and matrix co-eluting issues. To deal with the ever-growing number of pesticides, food safety laboratories need to ideally screen as many compounds as possible in a short time which may exceed maximum residual limits; typically 10 ppb in food matrices. Supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) is one of the separation techniques, and it offers high resolution at high flow rates and various separation modes. Therefore, it has the potential to separate multiple pesticides in a single run. In this study, we developed an analytical method for 441 pesticides in food matrices by QuEChERS and SFC/MS.