Simple, fast, and non-targeted detection of multi-pesticides in fruit with chemometrics-assisted magnetic "one-step" strategy

A chemometrics-assisted magnetic “one-step” method was proposed for the fast and non-targeted detection of multi-pesticides in fruit samples with gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS). In this method, extraction/partitioning and cleanup were integrated into one step with magnetic adsorbent, which thus was simple and time-saving (within 3.5 min) in sample preparation. Fast temperature program was used to further shorten analysis time in GC–MS. However, the measured GC–MS signal obtained with the fast method was easily composed of overlapping peaks and a high level of background. Automatic information mining of unknown multi-pesticides in complex GC–MS data was achieved with the adaptive iteratively reweighted penalized least squares-moving window target transfer factor analysis V2.0 algorithm, with reference to the pesticide mass spectral library. Two mixed standards (34 and 39 pesticides) and three kinds of fruit samples were used to verify this method. All pesticides in the mixed pesticide standards were detected with standard temperature program. Furthermore, all spiked pesticides in different fruit samples were detected with a total detection time of 8.5 min.