
Read the
magazine
story to find out more. New Method
Speeds Up Pesticide Residue MonitoringBy Jim Core July 2, 2003A new approach to analyzing diverse
pesticide residues in fruits and vegetables makes it easier and less expensive
for analytical chemists to do their jobs. QuEChERS (pronounced catchers), developed by the
Agricultural Research Service, stands
for "quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged and safe." It's a
streamlined approach for extracting pesticide residues from food samples and
preparing them for analysis. Steven J. Lehotay, a research chemist with ARS'
Eastern Regional Research Center,
Wyndmoor, Pa., developed the QuEChERS method with Michelangelo Anastassiades, a
visiting scientist from a government laboratory in Stuttgart, Germany. Current methods are time-consuming, expensive and labor-intensive.
Therefore, monitoring rates are low, and laboratory costs are high. According to the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, more than half of the samples of produce tested in the
United States typically do not have measurable residues. Less than one percent
of tested samples exceed the maximum amount of a given pesticide or its
breakdown products allowed to remain in or on food commodities. Washing,
peeling or cooking most produce can help remove most residues. Using QuEChERS, a single chemist can now prepare a batch of 10 previously
chopped samples in about 30 minutes with $1 of materials per sample. This
translates to at least 4-fold lower material costs than traditional methods.
According to Lehotay, the method also combines different steps, which reduces
the chance for errors. A single, easy-to-clean Teflon tube is the only item to be washed and
reused, eliminating all of the glassware used in conventional methods. Less
than 10 milliliters of solvent waste is generated, much less than the 75-450
milliliters generated by other methods. One key to the new approach is the
development of a rapid procedure, called "dispersive solid-phase
extraction," to quickly remove interfering nontarget compounds and
residual water. Read more about this research in the July issue of Agricultural Research
magazine. ARS is the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's chief scientific research agency. U.S. Department of Agriculture |