Trace determination of five triazole fungicide residues in traditional Chinese medicine samples by dispersive solid-phase extraction combined with ultrasound-assisted dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction and UHPLC-MS/MS.

A novel and reliable method for determination of five triazole fungicide residues (triadimenol, tebuconazole, diniconazole, flutriafol, and hexaconazol) in traditional Chinese medicine samples was developed using dispersive solid-phase extraction combined with ultrasound-assisted dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction before ultra-high performance liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry. The clean up of the extract was conducted using dispersive solid-phase extraction by directly adding sorbents into the extraction solution, followed by shaking and centrifugation. After that, a mixture of 400 μL trichloromethane (extraction solvent) and 0.5 mL of the above supernatant was injected rapidly into water for the dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction procedure. The factors affecting the extraction efficiency were optimized. Under the optimum conditions, the calibration curves showed good linearity in the range of 2.0-400 (tebuconazole, diniconazole, and hexaconazole) and 4.0-800 ng/g (triadimenol and flutriafol) with the regression coefficients higher than 0.9958. The limit of detection and limit of quantification for the present method were 0.5-1.1 and 1.8-4.0 ng/g, respectively. The recoveries of the target analytes ranged from 80.2 to 103.2%. The proposed method has been successfully applied to the analysis of five triazole fungicides in traditional Chinese medicine samples, and satisfactory results were obtained.