Simple and rapid nanothegnology-based microextraction technique coupled with HPLC-DAD for simultaneous determination of paraquat dichloride hydrate, diazinon and alphacypermethrin in raw and processed milk samples

The determination of pesticides, especially in food matrices, is a topic of great relevance. Since hundreds of pesticides are applied in several crops to combat possible pests that may affect agricultural production [1, 2]. Whereas that the presence of amounts in levels of traces, of both pesticide residues and their degradation products are potential causes of health risks, these must be controlled and monitored. Therefore, many countries include these analytes as hazardous pollutants to human health. Accordingly, monitoring of pesticide residues in food is of great interest to ensure food security. Among them, alphacypermethrin, paraquat and diazinon are commonly used pesticides in West Azarbayjan Province which their quantitation in milk samples appears to present some extra benefits for the optimal monitoring of them and increasing food safety. The propose of this study is development a sensitive, rapid, environment friendly and cost effective off-line microextraction technique combining HPLC-DAD for simultaneous determination of the in-question pesticides in raw and processed milk samples. At the moment, there is a lack of using cost effective chromatographic techniques in combination with facile nano-technology based sample clean up techniques for simultaneous analysis of these important persistent organic pollutants [3]. This paper intents to fill this gap and describes a novel solid-phase microextraction technique based on fiber coated with a nanoclay/ionic liquid composite.The efficiency of the proposed microextraction process was no affected by the samples matrix, therefore the analytical characteristics of the method were evaluated from spiked milk samples. The results revealed that the presented technique demonstrates acceptable figures of merit under the optimized conditions and the correlation coefficients (R2) were higher than 0.997 for each analyte. Finally this developed method was successfully applied to determine alphacypermethrin, paraquat and diazinon in several and different milk sources.