A Rapid and Sensitive Single Residual Method for Determination of Ethephon in Grape, Tomato and Lentil

A rapid and sensitive single residual method (SRM) for the determination of ethephon which resemble a very polar, non-QuEChERS-amenable and plant growth regulator was developed. This method is applicable for determination of ethephon in vegetables, fruits and herbs. This method is simply based on extraction of ethephon with deionized water with using an equal amount of dichloro methane in order to purify the aqueous face of ethephon extract then, centrifuge, filtering using an acrodisck to be directly injected by HPLC coupled tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). Different recovery tests have been done on grape, tomato and lentil samples to test the performance of this method. The result showed that the average recoveries is in the accepted general recovery range (70 -120%). The results also showed that this method is linear up to 5μg/kg level and has a lower Limit of quantitation equal to 0.01μg/kg.