Capillary electrophoresis of pesticides

Abstract

Pesticides are important and diverse environmental and agricultural species. Their determination in pesticide formulations, in feed and food, and in complex environmental matrices (e.g., water, soil, sludge, sediments, etc.) often requires separation methods of high efficiency, unique selectivity and high sensitivity. As shown in this comprehensive review, capillary electrophoresis meets these requirements and has proved to be a suitable microseparation technique for the analysis of a wide variety of chiral and achiral pesticides. It is also shown that by combining selective precolumn derivatization schemes, sensitive detection methods (e.g., laser induced fluorescence detection) and trace enrichment techniques, capillary electrophoresis (CE) is capable of determining pesticides at trace levels as those usually encountered in environmental samples.