Characterization of the new PAL micro-SPE cartridge for pesticides extract clean-up

Micro-SPE (µSPE) has emerged as a micromethod for sample preparation and clean-up in food safety, proteomics, forensic, environmental and analysis. Applications are wide-ranging and cover drugs, environmental contaminants, and, in particular, the QuEChERS extract cleanup in multiresidue pesticide analysis. The automation of the µSPE sample preparation steps led to the desired increase in sample throughput, unification of the used sorbent materials for food commodities, and the potential for the online hyphenation with GC-MS and LC-MS instrumentation. With the increasing demand and the use of automated µSPE workflows on PAL Systems, the requirement for extended functionality evolved due to mechanical and also analytical limitations of the initially employed ITSP micro-SPE cartridge (ITSP Solutions Inc., Hartwell GA, USA). With the new PAL µSPE cartridge CTC Analytics introduced a novel septumless cartridge design dedicated to an extended application range and a reliable high throughput automation. In this poster, the evaluation of the new cartridge design is presented with results for pesticides analysis from leading laboratories.