Risk assessment of cartap residue in tea should include the exposure of cartap and its metabolite due to rapid degradation of cartap into nereistoxin. Herein, a reliable method for determination of cartap and nereistoxin in tea was developed by hydrophilic interaction chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. Target compounds were extracted with water containing 1% formic acid and 5 mM ammonium formate. The use of dichloromethane effectively removed caffeine. Tea extracts were cleaned up by dispersive adsorbents of octadecylsilane and strong anion exchanger, then further purified using hydrophilic lipophilic balanced solid phase extraction cartridge. Isotopic internal standard was employed to calibrate the loss of analytes during sample preparation and compensate matrix effects. Method validation illustrated excellent linearity, with correlation coefficients (R2) higher than 0.999. Satisfactory recoveries of target compounds spiked in green tea, black tea and oolong tea ranged from 87.6% to 119.9% with intra- and inter-day precisions below 20%. Limits of quantification of cartap and nereistoxin were 10.0 μg kg-1, and limits of detection were 2.0 μg kg-1 for cartap and 4.0 μg kg-1 for nereistoxin. The developed method was applied to determine cartap and nereistoxin in thirty tea samples.
Keywords: Cartap; Hydrophilic interaction chromatography tandem mass spectrometry; Nereistoxin; Solid phase extraction; Tea.
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