Rapid selective accelerated solvent extraction and simultaneous determination of herbicide atrazine and its metabolites in fruit by ultra high performance liquid chromatography.

A selective accelerated solvent extraction procedure achieved one step extraction and cleanup for analysis of herbicide atrazine and its metabolites in fruit. Using a BEH C18 analytical column and the gradient mode with 2 mM ammonium acetate aqueous solution/acetonitrile as a mobile phase achieved effective chromatographic separation of the five analytes within 4 min. The calibration curves were linear over two orders of magnitude of concentration with correlation coefficients (r) of 0.9996-0.9999. The method limit of quantification was 1, 2, 1.5, 3, and 2 μg/kg for atrazine, desethylatrazine, desisopropylatrazine, desethyldesisopropylatrazine, and hydroxyatrazine, respectively, in the case of atrazine it is at least two orders of magnitude lower than the maximum residue limit (0.25 mg/kg). The intra-day and inter-day precisions of the five analytes were in the range of 2.1-3.5 and 3.1-4.8 %, respectively. The recoveries of the five analytes at three spiked levels varied from 85.9 to 107% with a relative standard deviation of 1.8-4.9% for pear and apple samples. The ultra high performance liquid chromatography with diode array detection method was proved to be fast, inexpensive, selective, sensitive, and accurate for the quantification of the analytes in pear and apple samples.