A Highly Efficient Preconcentration/Clean-Up Method for Insecticides, Fungicides, and Herbicides Determination in Water Samples and Flour Samples by HPLC-DAD Using Water-Induced and Restricted-Access Supramolecular Microextraction

Abstract

A green supramolecular vortex-assisted microextraction employing a mixture of 1-decanol and tetrahydrofuran (THF) was developed for the simultaneous extraction of pesticides from different classes (insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides) from water and flour samples, followed by their determination in high-performance liquid chromatography with diode array detector (HPLC-DAD). The most favorable results were achieved at pH 6.0 in the presence of 4% (m/v) NaCl, utilizing a low volume of 1-decanol and THF (75 and 400 µL, respectively), a short vortex-assisted extraction time (120 s), and centrifugation time (120 s). These conditions yielded high preconcentration factors ranging from 50.1 to 90.3 and low limits of quantification (LOQs) ranging from 1.3 to 27.3 µg L-1. The intraday (n = 10) and interday (n =1 0) precision, assessed as the percentage of relative standard deviation (RSD), varied from 4.4 to 12.4%. The optimized method was successfully applied to determine the pesticides in water and flour samples, with recoveries ranging from 81 to 111%.