Efficient Start-to-Finish Analysis of Pesticide Residues in Foods

Pre-Workshop

Instructor: Steven Lehotay, PhD, Lead Scientist, USDA, Wyndmoor PA

This four hour educational event offers the chance for participants to learn about efficient high-quality and high-throughput analysis of pesticide residues in food.  Just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, all aspects to the analytical process should be optimized and streamlined.  Thus, efficient and effective ways to conduct sample processing (comminution), sample preparation (extraction and cleanup), analysis (separation and detection), and data handling (peak integration, quantification, and identification) will be described and discussed.  A validated, automated approach to monitor hundreds of pesticides in foods by rapid, robust, and reliable GC- and LC- MS(/MS) techniques while avoiding human data review will be presented.    
 
Syllabus:
1)    Introduction and Background: purposes for analysis, data quality objectives, and validation
2)    Sample Processing: theory and practice to quickly obtain minimal but representative sample test portions for analysis
3)    Sample preparation: theory and practice of different extraction and cleanup methods, including automation, to achieve high and consistent recoveries of a wide scope of analytes (or narrow scope depending on the application) while minimizing direct and indirect interferences and matrix effects from sample components
4)    Analysis: high-throughput methods less than 10 min each in gas and liquid chromatography coupled to modern mass spectrometric techniques for the detection of hundreds of analytes in complex matrices
5)    Data handling: how to automatically integrate chromatographic peaks with reliable quantification and identification of analytes at trace levels in complex matrices without human review or manual re-integrations