Chromatography Forum

We are new to the pesticides and want to try something new. Has anyone tried analyzing pesticides with headspace analysis and SPME. In theory it is supposed to skip all the clean-up steps (Quechers). Any ideas on why this won't work?

There could be a fair ammount of variability. Some types of compounds work really well with SPME at certain levels others have precission and/or calibration linearity issues. Also it is advisable to use deuterated itsd's as even closely related ITSD's can have differing binding kenetics and thermodynamics.

And finally the big one is Matrix effects. One really needs a blank matrix for calibration because everything effects binding to the fiber.

in addition to MSCHemist:
it might be hard to get the 'heavy' pesticides into the headspace fase. You'll have to heat things up quite a bit.
This heat might cause other compounds to break down.

Has anyone tried analyzing pesticides with headspace analysis and SPME.

If they have it will have been published somewhere, so try a literature search and an internet search.

Peter