Interlaboratory comparison of a general method to screen foods for pesticides using QuEChERs extraction with high performance liquid chromatography and high resolution mass spectrometry.

An interlaboratory comparison of a multipesticide residue analytical method is reported. The goal of the comparison was to evaluate the potential for liquid chromatography/high resolution mass spectrometry along with a specific automated screening procedure to allow the determination of the presence or absence of a set of targeted compounds without additional manual review. The method utilized an off the shelf QuEChERs based extraction followed by analysis with an orbitrap mass spectrometer with the data evaluated by ToxID. The method was tested at three laboratories, with three produce matrices (spinach, carrots, and oranges), and three levels of spiked pesticides with all analyses in triplicate. A series of 247 compounds were tested, and it was found that the three laboratories produced consistent data; however, manual review was still necessary. The data was shown to have no false negatives for 211 compounds in the three produce matrixes at 200 ppb. Of these 211 compounds, 189 had no false negatives at 50 ppb, and 129 had no false negatives at 10 ppb. The HRMS method was shown to be robust with similar data being achieved by all three laboratories and detectable concentrations only slightly above the range shown for triple quadrupole MS/MS.