Simultaneous determination of parathion and p-nitrophenol in vegetable tissues by derivative spectrophotometry

A first derivative spectrophotometric method has been developed for the determination of parathion and p-nitrophenol in vegetable tissues. Ethanol was used as solvent for extracting the compounds from the tissues and subsequently the samples were evaluated against a vegetable tissue blank, directly by derivative spectrophotometry. The simultaneous determination of these compounds can be carried out using the zero-crossing approach for parathion at 253.0 nm and for p-nitrophenol at 273.1 nm. In the samples each analyte was determined in the presence of one another in the ranges between 4.9 to 3883.5 microg g(-1) for parathion and 4.9 to 3285.3 microg g(-1) for p-nitrophenol. The detection limits (3a) were found to be 1.5 and 1.4 microg g(-1) for parathion and p-nitrophenol, respectively. The relative standard deviations were in all instances less than 1.8%. The proposed method was applied to the determination of the analytes in spiked leaves of corn. The results show a good recovery and they are in agreement with those obtained by polarography.