Extraction of Pesticides from Cucumber, Tomato, and Green Pepper
June 01, 2022
Pesticide testing is crucial to assessing the safety of fruits and vegetables for consumption. The traditional extraction method for pesticides from produce is the QuEChERS method. This method is tedious, manual, time consuming, and wasteful. Thus, there is a need for improved methods of extraction. In this application note, the EDGE®, in combination with Q-Matrix™ Hydra, a water-removing sorbent, was used to extract a panel of pesticides from 10 g of homogenized cucumber, tomato, and green pepper in less than 9 min. The recoveries of the pesticide panel were greater than 70% for each matrix tested, and these results were highly reproducible. The EDGE provides a fully automated extraction that combines both the sample and sorbent into one sample vessel, alleviating the human burden of extraction and the need for multiple sample transfers.
