Liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry as a tool to investigate pesticides and their degradation products

The analytical determination of organic structures is a fundamental need in environmental, food and medicinal chemistry, and the chemistry of pesticide compounds is closely involved in this determination because of the environmental and biological transformations that can occur to these molecules. Degradation products often possess higher toxicity than parent substances but unknown structures, and aqueous milieu produce hard-to-solve instrumental problems. The need to analyze low concentrations in polar solutions means that methods in which liquid chromatography is hyphenated to mass spectrometry have a large playing field, which combines trace determination and structural elucidation. An important area of study comprises degradation-simulating models, such as titanium dioxide mediated photocatalytic attacks on different organic structures. HPLC-mass spectrometric studies on pesticides, their metabolites and their degradation products are reviewed.