[Determination of five triazine herbicides in infant milk powder by high performance liquid chromatography coupled...

A high performance liquid chromatography coupled with homogeneous liquid-liquid microextraction was developed for the determination of five triazine herbicides in infant milk powders. The ionic liquid was used as microextraction solvent. The separation of the herbicides was performed on an Eclipse XDB-C18 column using acetonitrile and water as mobile phases in gradient mode. The effects of homogeneous liquid-liquid extraction conditions on the experimental results were investigated in detail. Under the optimized experimental conditions, the calibration curves for determining the analytes were linear and the correlation coefficients were ≥ 0.9992. The limits of detection for cyanazine, desmetryn, terbumeton, terbuthylazine and dimethametryn were 12.1, 13.8, 11.8, 14.6 and 13.7 μg/kg, respectively. The recoveries of the analytes spiked in four infant milk powders ranged from 92.2% to 103.2% and the relative standard deviations were lower than 6%. This method is sensitive, simple, and suitable for the determination of triazine herbicides in milk powder samples.