Rapid analysis of multicomponent pesticide mixture by GC–MS with the aid of chemometric resolution

Applications of hyphenated chromatographic techniques, especially GC–MS technique, have been reported in chemical, biological, environmental, agricultural and medical analysis. The complexity of the samples in these fields is still an obstacle for the technique to be practical and the overlapping of the multicomponent signals induces chemometric methods widely employed. In this work, taking the rapid analysis of pesticide mixture as an example, a chemometric approach was proposed for resolution of multicomponent overlapping GC–MS signal. In the method, a mass spectral library of pesticides was organized at first, then target factor analysis (TFA) was employed for testing the existence of a specific pesticide in the multicomponent overlapping GC–MS signal, and finally the chromatographic information of the pesticide was extracted by a non-negative immune algorithm (IA). A GC–MS signal of a 40-component pesticide mixture eluted within 9 min was analyzed by the method. It was found that the mass spectra and chromatographic profiles of almost all the pesticides can be obtained.