Tätigkeitsbericht der Kaiser Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften für das Geschäftsjahr 1940/41

The Science of Nature -     

Tätigkeitsbericht der Kaiser Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften für das Geschäftsjahr 1939/40

Das Jahr 1939 brachte mit dem Ausbruch des großen Kampfes um Deutschlands Freiheit und Zukunft auch für die Kaiser Wilhelm-Gesellschaft die Notwendigkeit gewisser Umstellungen, jedoch wird hiervon die der Tradition der Gesellschaft entsprechende Grundlagenforschung in keiner Weise berührt. Die folgenden Ausschnitte aus der Tätigkeit der Gesellschaft und ihrer Institute beweisen, daß die ihrem Aufbau zugrunde liegenden Gedanken — die ihren ersten Vorkämpfer schon inAlexander von Humboldt gefunden haben — auch in der jetzigen Zeit ihre Gültigkeit behalten, eine Tatsache, die im Hinblick auf die 30. Wiederkehr des Gründungstages der Kaiser Wilhelm-Gesellschaft am 11. Januar 1941 von besonderer Bedeutung ist.     

HPLC-MS/MS in der Rückstandsanalytik von Pflanzenschutzmitteln

Goal and Scope

Increasing demands from the regulatory authorities of plant protection products for residue analytical methods on the one hand and the need for cost reduction by shorter development times on the other hand have led to a significant displacement of conventional methods (e.g. HPLC-UV or GC-MS) by HPLC-MS/MS with atmospheric pressure ionization (API) in residue analysis since the mid of the 1990s. This development started in the pharmaceutical industries where HPLC-MS/MS had already been used for the quantitation of drugs and their metabolites in plasma since the late 1980s.

Methods

The reason for the high acceptability of HPLC-MS/MS with electrospray ionisation (ESI) or chemical ionization at atmosheric pressure (APCI) compared with alternative methods are shown with respect to analytical quality parameters, compliance with international registration guidelines and economic reasons.

Results and Conclusion

HPLC-MS/MS is being applied for solving ca. 75% of all analytical problems occuring in modern residue analytical laboratories. This technique offers convincing advantages for the determination of plant protection products and their metabolites in various matrices. These are a reduced number of or no clean-up steps after extraction of the samples, high throughput besides high ruggedness, low limits of detection and a large linear measuring range. In addition, several analytes of various chemical classes can be determined within one chromatographic run. Due to the high selectivity there is only little need for additional confirmatory methods. For enforcement purposes HPLC-MS/MS is accepted by the European authorities since 2002. However, due to high costs for instrumentation and specially skilled personnel only few enforcement laboratories have invested into this technology, so far.

Recommendation and Perspective

The importance of HPLC-MS/MS in residue analysis will further increase, as new ionization techniques will enable the analysis of more analytes and as the investment costs will decrease in the future. However, proven conventional methods will still survive in some cases. New concepts, such as parallel HPLC-MS/MS or on-line purification of extracts by column switching which are already widely used in the pharmaceutical industry could help to further increase the throughput. However, for a sound evaluation with respect to their applicability in residue analysis there is so far too little experience.