Application Note: Determination of Pesticides in Tea Automated with FREESTYLE QuEChERS and LC-MS/MS

QuEChERS has become the most important analytical method in routine pesticide labs for food and feed samples. In particular, nearly all types of fruits and vegetables are analysed with this methodology worldwide for several hundred pesticides applied in agriculture.

The original QuEChERS set-up in brief consists of two main steps, the extraction and the clean-up step. Both of them are typically manually performed and use a dispersive approach, where two different buffer/salt and clean-up mixes are added to matrix solutions, respectively, with subsequent vortexing and centrifugation steps.

The aim of this application note is to show an automated approach for the second, the clean-up step in a non-dispersive way. Automation itself is a warrantor for highly precise processing with reduced deviation of analytical results even in sequences with a high sample number.