Simultaneous determination of carbamate pesticide residues in purple yam by high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry

The high sensitive liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry ( LC-MS/MS) had been developed for the detection of 5 carbamate pesticides in purple yam.After extraction of the pesticides with cyclohexane and ethyl acetate ( v /v = 1∶1) , the extract was purified by automatic gel purification system using cyclohexane and ethyl acetate ( v /v = 1 ∶ 1) as mobile phase.Analysis was performed by liquid chromatography- electrospray ionization-tandem mass spectrometry operated in the multiple reaction monitoring ( MRM) mode, and the separation conditions were optimized.The results showed that calibration curves were linear and covered from 1.0 to 50.0μg /L, and the correlation coefficients was 0.9983⁰.9999.The average recoveries, measured at 2.0 to 10.0μg /kg, were in the range82.05% to 97.27% for all of the compounds tested with relative standard deviations were between 2.85% to 6.63%.The results indicated that the method had been demonstrated to be simple, accurate, practical and high sensitive for the determination of carbamates residues in purple yam samples.