Unravelling plant protection product analysis: use of chromatography techniques (GC and LC) and high resolution mass spectrometry

Abstract

This study proposes a methodology for the characterization of plant protection products (PPPs) based on suspect and unknown analyses. This was divided in three main stages: sample preparation, separation and detection, and data analysis. Sample preparation was based on dilute and shoot strategies employing different solvents depending on both the type of compounds and the type of PPPs to be analyzed. Chromatographic techniques, as liquid (LC) and gas chromatography (GC), coupled with high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) analyzers are used for the separation and detection stage. HRMS allowed a huge number of possibilities in terms of data acquisition, and this work reveals the most suitable options and the principal parameters to maximize the number of features and to perform an accurate detection. Finally, tips and recommendations to perform data analysis are indicated, providing the pre-processing and processing strategies to perform suspect screening and unknown analysis.