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The Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2018/840 established the watch list of substances for Union-wide monitoring in the field of water policy pursuant to Directive 2008/105/EC and Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2015/495. This Decision establishes additional substances and their maximum acceptable method detection limits including neonicotinoids (9-500 ng/L). During the pesticides extraction from water, the solid-phase extraction (SPE) column was used. Bakerbond spe™ SDB-1 SPE and Bond Elut Plexa were evaluated for the SPE of neonicotinoids (imidacloprid, thiamethoxam, acetamiprid, thiacloprid and clothianidin) from water. The comparation of the results of these two types of columns, was performed by spiking water samples at two levels (0.05 and 0.1 μg/L) in three replicates. The Bakerbond™ column quantitatively adsorbed these pesticides, with the obtained recoveries: 36.9 % for imidacloprid, 43.2 % for thiacloprid, 119.3 % for clothianidin, 64.6 % for acetamiprid and 53.6 % for thiamethoxam. Using Bond Elut Plexa the obtained recoveries were 66.9 % for imidacloprid, 72.9% for thiacloprid, 103.4 % for clothianidin, 67.4 % for acetamiprid and 45.2% for thiamethoxam. Both colums have low recovery values for thiametoxam, while the highest values were obtained by Bond Elut Plexa for thiacloprid, imidacloprid and acetamiprid. Great recoveries were achieved for clothianidin using both SPE columns.

The organic food is progressively enticing purchasers&rsquo, attention, as it is recognized to be better than the food produced by the conventional agriculture and more sustainable for the natural environment. Pesticides and their metabolites can enter the human body via food and water. In the food production, over 60 thousand chemical agents are applied, while 90% of the harmful substances are consumed. The organic production is based on the qualitative and healthy food using the natural resources in an ecologically sustainable way. The European Regulations set the maximum pesticide levels (MRLs) in the organic products, which are also regulated by The United States Department of Agriculture in their National program supported by The United States Environmental Protection Agency. It is imperative to bear in mind that in the products from the organic production, the multiple detections cannot be tolerated, i.e., that one product cannot contain more than two detected pesticide residues. In this paper, a multi-residue pesticide method has been developed to determine the pesticides in the agricultural products from the organic and conventional production. In this work, 60 pesticides were analyzed using a simple QuEChERS sample preparation procedure, followed by LC-MS/MS. The tomato, potato, apple, and carrot samples from the organic and conventional products were collected from the market and the pesticide residues assessment comparing the organic to the conventional was done.

Summary The undemanding LC-MS/MS method was developed for the synchronized analysis of atropine and scopolamine in maize crop. The dSPE was carried out with 1% acetic acid in acetonitrile/water and a mixture of magnesium sulphate, sodium chloride and sodium citrate. The analytes were separated on a Zorbax XDB C18 column using methanol/water as the mobile phase in gradient mode. The detection was done using a tandem masss spectrometry (MS/MS) in the positive ESI. The tropane alkaloids exhibited excellent linearity in the range of 2-20 µg/kg with the LOQ of 5 µg/kg for maize. The extraction recoveries of atropine and scopolamine were 65.7 and 85.5% with the intraday RSDr 10.25 and 4.29%, respectively. The validated method was appled to real maze samples. One sample contained 18.8 µg/kg of atropine and 6.3 µg/kg of scopolamine.