CLEANUP TECHNIQUES FOR PESTICIDES IN FATTY FOODS

The separation of pesticides and other chemical contaminants from high-fat food samples prior to subsequent steps in the analytical process (usually gas chromatography) is a problem to which much effort in method development has been applied. Early methods involved liquid-liquid partitioning, adsorption chromatography and chemical destruction of lipids with strong base and acid. These techniques had limited applicability, especially with the advent of more polar and labile pesticides. Later developments involving sweep codistillation, gel-permeation chromatography and reversed-phase liquid chromatography on alkyl-bonded microparticulate silica are applicable to a wider range of analytes and are generally faster and more efficient and consume less reagents. Supercritical fluid extraction should prove useful in this regard. A brief overview of methods developed for isolating trace levels of environmental contaminants from lipids is presented. © 1990.