Determination of Maneb Residues, in Tomatoes, by Spectrophotometric Method of Acid Hydrolysis, Through Multivariate Calibration

In this work, a chemometric method was applied through multivariate calibration, PLS (Partial Least Squares), to establish the analysis of ethylenebisdithiocarbamates residues in tomatoes samples by the hydrolysis method. The algorithm used to implement the PLS in the MatLab environment on IBM-compatible personal computer, was obtained from chemometrics package PLS_ToolBox. In samples with elevated levels of Maneb the univariate calibration showed similar results to the multivariate calibration. However, in samples with lower levels of residues increases occurred in the order of 15 to 47% in the levels detected by the multivariate calibration. In addition, there was a significant decrease in the standard deviations, in relation to those obtained, when the method of univariate calibration was used. The levels of contamination by Maneb found in tomatoes samples were below the maximum established by the Brazilian legislation.