Abstract
     In this study, the application of atmospheric pressure gas chromatography quadrupole-time-of-flightmass spectrometry (APGC-QTOF-MS) has been investigated for simultaneous determination of fifteenorganochlorine pesticides in soil and water. Soft ionization of atmospheric pressure gas chromatographywas evaluated by comparing with traditional more energetic electron impact ionization (EI). APGC-QTOF-MS showed a sensitivity enhancement by approximately 7–305 times. The QuEChERs (Quick, Easy, Cheap,Effective, Rugged, and Safe) method was used to pretreat the soil samples and solid phase extraction (SPE)cleanup was used for water samples. Precision, accuracy and stability experiments were undertaken toevaluate the feasibility of the method. The results showed that the mean recoveries for all the pesticidesfrom the soil samples were 70.3–118.9% with 0.4–18.3% intra-day relative standard deviations (RSD)and 1.0–15.6% inter-day RSD at 10, 50 and 500 g/L levels, while the mean recoveries of water sampleswere 70.0–118.0% with 1.1–17.8% intra-day RSD and 0.5–12.2% inter-day RSD at 0.1, 0.5 and 1.0 g/Llevels. Excellent linearity (0.9931 r2≤ 0.9999) was obtained for each pesticides in the soil and watermatrix calibration curves within the range of 0.01–1.0 mg/L. The limits of detection (LOD) for each of the15 pesticides was less than 3.00 g/L, while the limit of quantification (LOQ) was less than 9.99 g/L insoil and water. Furthermore, the developed method was successfully applied to monitor the targetedpesticides in real soil and water samples.