Accelerated solvent extraction by using an ‘in-line’ clean-up approach for multiresidue analysis of pesticides in organic honey

Abstract

The worldwide loss of honeybee colonies may be due to their exposure to several contaminants (i.e., pesticides); such contamination may also have impacts on consumers' health. Therefore, it is essential to develop quick and new methods to detect several pesticide residues in honey samples. In this study, the effectiveness of accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) was compared with QuEChERS methods for the analysis of 53 pesticides in organic honey by gas chromatography-triple quadrupole mass spectrometry. Two simple and rapid ASE methods with 'in-line' clean-up were optimised and then compared with QuEChERS. Hexane-ethyl acetate (Hex:EtAc) and Florisil were chosen as extraction solvent and retainer for the first ASE method respectively; acetonitrile and a primary-secondary amine phase (ACN-PSA) were selected for the second ASE method. The methods were validated according to the European Union SANTE/11945/2015 guidelines. The validation parameters showed that QuEChERS and ASE with PSA as retainer had better repeatability than ASE with Hex:EtAc and Florisil. In particular, QuEChERS and ASE (ACN-PSA) showed good recovery, according to the SANTE criteria, for the majority of investigated pesticides. Conversely, when ASE with Hex:EtAc and Florisil was used as the retainer, several compounds showed recoveries lower than the acceptable value of 70%. The ASE in-line method was finally applied to evaluate pesticide concentration in organic honey samples.

Accelerated Solvent Extraction of Terpenes in Cannabis Coupled With Various Injection Techniques for GC-MS Analysis

“…The Full Evaporative Technique (FET), which is popular within the cannabis testing industry, was not evaluated in the current study as this technique’s foundation is HS-Syringe; and the results discussed in HS-Syringe vs. HS-SPME Arrow vs. DI-SPME Arrow demonstrated that HS-Syringe did not perform as well as HS-SPME Arrow, which was also inferior to DI-SPME Arrow for the analysis of terpenes. Other industries already capitalize on the benefits of ASE 350 ( Ligor et al, 2014 ; Chiesa et al, 2017 ; Hu et al, 2020 ; Ning et al, 2020 ). Therefore, a simple hand shakeout solvent extraction method was compared to an ASE 350 extraction method to evaluate the performance of each technique for extracting terpenes from cannabis flower.…”

“…The following study was conducted to evaluate more modern sample preparation and introduction techniques and demonstrate their potential value to cannabis compliance testing laboratories in need of guidance for qualitative and quantitative terpenes analysis. In addition, this study evaluated accelerated solvent extraction (ASE 350) of terpenes in cannabis samples, which is commonly used in other markets within the analytical testing industry ( Ligor et al, 2014 ; Chiesa et al, 2017 ; Hu et al, 2020 ; Ning et al, 2020 ). Furthermore, to avoid potentially inaccurate reporting, matrix matched standards were used for calibration.…”

Application of mass spectrometry-based metabolomics approaches for food safety, quality and traceability

“…These environmentally green tools even allow the coupling with in-line clean-up steps using adsorbents. This strategy was followed for the extraction of pesticides from honey that were subsequently analyzed by GC-MS/MS [5]. Readers interested on gaining deeper insight on extraction methods and sample preparation for the analysis of contaminants in foods are referred to recent excellent review papers [2,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12].…”

Multivariate optimization of a combined static and dynamic supercritical fluid extraction method for trace analysis of pesticides pollutants in organic honey

“…In the case of honey, the nature of the matrix makes extraction of pesticides a complicated process because of the high sugar content and the presence of other compounds such as proteins, amino acids, and organic acids. These groups of chemicals may interfere with target pesticides during the analysis [18,19]. Pesticides in honey are commonly extracted using pressurized liquid extraction [18], the QuEChERS method [13,16,19], liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) [14,15,18,20], or by SPE after dilution of the honey sample with water [20].…”

“…These groups of chemicals may interfere with target pesticides during the analysis [18,19]. Pesticides in honey are commonly extracted using pressurized liquid extraction [18], the QuEChERS method [13,16,19], liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) [14,15,18,20], or by SPE after dilution of the honey sample with water [20]. Furthermore, dispersive liquidliquid microextraction (DLLME) [8,9] was also used for the analysis of pesticides residue in honey samples.…”