Pesticide Residues in Surface Water and Groundwater - Pesticides: Evaluation of Environmental Pollution - page 287

of the GC × GC coupling to MS has been shown in the simultaneous determination of 97
environmental contaminants, including pesticides at ng/L levels (Matamoros et al. 2010).
Recently, one of the hottest trends in water contaminant analysis has been the use of
LC with full scan and high-resolution MS (HRMS) to identify unknown contaminants
(nontarget analysis) or provide confirmation data (Richardson 2009). This identification
relies on the mass accuracy obtained, with mass errors below 2 mDa or 5 ppm normally
being accepted for a positive identification (Hernández et al. 2004). Nowadays, the most
commonly used mass analyzer in HRMS instruments is TOF. For example, it has been
shown that the higher mass resolution of TOF allows the detection of some pesticides in
river water, even when they are accompanied by isobaric compounds (Hogenboom et al.
1999). Furthermore, LC-TOF has been the selected technique for the determination of pes-
ticide degradation products in environmental, biological, and food matrices (Martínez
Vidal et al. 2009). Even more useful in terms of confirmatory analysis is a quadrupole-TOF
hybrid instrument (Q-TOF) as it allows MS 2 experiments to be performed, thus improv-
ing selectivity (Hernández et al. 2004; Barceló and Petrovic 2007). LC-Q-TOF has been
successfully applied in the nontarget analysis of pesticides (Meng et al. 2010) and their
metabolites (Hernández et al. 2008a) as well as disinfection by-products (Brix et al. 2009).
Acknowledgments
The authors greatly appreciate the financial support from the Ministry of Science and
Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia (Project No. 172007).
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