Tropical peat as a versatile material for solid-phase extraction of pesticides from medicinal plant Cordia salicifolia

Abstract

Natural peat was tested for solid-phase extraction of acephate, chlorpropham, pirimicarb, bifenthrin, tetradifon and phosalone from the medicinal plant Cordia salicifolia, using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry with selected ion monitoring (GC/MS, SIM). Considering that there are no Brazilian regulations concerning maximum permissible pesticide residue concentrations in medicinal herbs, recovery experiments were carried out (three replicates) at two arbitrary fortification levels (0.5 and 1.0 mg kg -1), resulting in recoveries ranging from 64% to 118% and relative standard deviations between 5.6% and 26.4% for peat sorbent. Detection and quantification limits for herb ranged from 0.10 to 0.15 mg kg-1 and from 0.15 to 0.25 mg kg-1, respectively, for the different pesticides studied. The developed method was linear over the range assayed, 0.1-5.0 μg g -1, with correlation coefficients ranging from 0.9975 to 0.9986 for all pesticides. Comparison between natural peat and conventional sorbent (neutral alumina) showed similar performance of peat for the six pesticides tested. © 2010 Sociedade Brasileira de Química.