Pesticides are copiously used to kill unwanted pests and are an environmental contaminant. The goal of this study is to identify unknown pesticides from precipitation samples to determine if their presence is significant enough to raise concern. The samples were collected in northeast Ohio from the years 2018-2021 and analyzed using liquid chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC-QTOF-MS). In addition, an open-source data processing software program called MS-DIAL was used to annotate features based on MS/MS spectral similarity, exact match, and isotopic ratios. For further analysis, the data was prioritized based on abundance and the detected frequency of each feature. The resulting data set was narrowed down from 32,000 features to a little over 5,300 annotated features, with 32 final pesticides identified. Features will be confirmed by comparison against reference standards. If pesticides are found in the precipitation, this raises concern to reduce pesticide use in order to limit the harmful effects these contaminants have on the environment.

Analysis of pesticides in precipitation from Northeast Ohio using high-resolution mass spectrometry

ACS Spring 2022

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