Determination of Residual Triflumezopyrim Insecticide in Agricultural Products through a Modified QuEChERS Method

Abstract

A rapid and simple analytical method for triflumezopyrim, a new class of mesoionic insecticides and commercialized molecules from DuPont, was developed with a modified QuEChERS method. The pH adjustment was used to improve the extraction efficiency of acetonitrile solvent, and dispersive solid-phase extraction was employed for the clean-up process. The five selected food commodities were used to verify the present optimized method, which displayed good linearity with an excellent correlation coefficient (R2 = 0.9992–0.9998) in the 0.003–0.30 mg/kg calibration range. The method limits of detection (LOD) and quantification (LOQ) were determined to be a value of 0.003 and 0.01 mg/kg, respectively. The mean recovery for the triflumezopyrim was in the 89.7–104.3% range. The relative standard deviations were ≤9.8% for intra- (n = 5) and inter-day (n = 15) precisions at concentrations of 0.01, 0.1, and 0.5 mg/kg in the five representative samples. The matrix effect has been calculated to confirm the effect during ionization of the analyte in the UPLC-MS/MS. The matrix effects of the instrumental analysis showed that triflumezopyrim was less susceptible to matrices. The proposed analytical method in this study has effectively improved the accuracy, selectivity, and sensitivity for the determination of triflumezopyrim in agricultural commodities; therefore, it can serve as a reference method for the establishment of maximum residue limits (MRLs).