New spectrophotometric and HPLC-UV/visible methods for the analysis of pesticids

Abstract

The indiscriminate use of pesticides poses a serious health hazard for a large human population as well as for the flora and fauna of this planet. The present work deals with the development of sensitive and selective methods for the pesticide residue analysis in different food and environmental samples. Pesticides and their degradation products have widely proliferated the land and water, they are hazardous not only to farm workers but also to population as a whole through contamination of food, drinking water and other environmental features. Many of these pesticides are known carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, teratogens, mutants etc.These accumulate in important human organs and lead to progressively growing toxic effects.The pesticides are a necessary evil. The use of pesticides is required to control pests and to increase crop yield and hence ensuring food security for growing populations across the world. The need of the hour is to develop such efficient, rapid, powerful, sensitive and economical methods which could detect pesticides in various matrices to very low detection levels. Solid Phase Extraction is an effective and time tested pre-concentration technique. SPE alongwith HPLC has been used for the separation and quantitative determination of phenylurea herbicides. Further SPE-HPLC-UV has been employed to extract Azadirachtin pesticide from neem tree parts. newlineA new technique; MEPS (Microextraction by Packed Sorbent); which is miniaturized version of SPE has been used for the determination of Endocrine disruptor and suspected endocrine disruptor pesticides in various biological and environmental samples. This technique ensures less ssample prepation time and requires low sample volumes; as low as 10µL, hence is particularly useful for analysis in biological matrices. Derivative Spectrophotometry (DS) and spectrophotometrry have been effectively put to use for the quantitative analysis of dithiocarbamate (DTCs) fungicides and the methods have been successfully used for their analysis in different food.