Evaluation of pesticide residue contents in fruit juice by solid-phase microextraction and multidimensional gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry

► SPME-MDGC–MS method is adequate for the determination of a large number of pesticides. ► The employment of SPME-MDGC–MS technique permits to avoid false positives. ► SPME-MDGC–MS avoids the overlapping in juice samples. A new method based on the use of SPME followed by the MDGC–MS analysis was developed to determine pesticides in fruit juice. Different pesticide mixture standards (i.e. Mix 101, 13 and 164) were initially analyzed to optimize the separation conditions. To evaluate the advantages of the two-dimensional system over monodimensional GC, a comparative study on relative standard deviations, detection limits and correlation coefficients was carried out. As a result, selective transfers of some pesticides from the first to the second dimension were at times essential to avoid overlapping. The selected separation conditions from the study with standards were applied to fruit juices spiked with some pesticide standards. The results found in this work prove that the employment of a multidimensional analysis technique permits to avoid false positives obtained frequently on monodimensional techniques as a consequence of interferences of the analytes with matrix components.