Determination of thiabendazole in fruits and vegetables

Abstract

Thiabendazole is a member of benzimidazole fungicide group which is mostly used in citrus fruits and vegetables. Some fungicides pesticides contain benzimidazole compounds like thiabendazole, imazalil used for fruit’s post-harvest treatment. Pesticides are important source of diffuse pollutants that are the major cause of environmental and food contamination, as well as health risk for living organisms. Therefore there is a need to control the risk related to the application of these pesticides. Therefore there is a necessity of simple, fast and cost effective techniques for the quantitative determination of pesticides in both environment and food samples. Analysis of the exit level of thiabendazole residue in citrus fruits and vegetables are important for government and private food laboratories. The presented research explained techniquesused for the estimation of residue of thiabendazole in food samples by high performance liquid chromatography and UV spectrophotometer. In this analysis, extraction of sample peels and pulps was done separately with the help of chloroform. Thiabendazole separated from the obtained extract through hydrochloric acid. By comparison of absorbance of standard thiabendazole with food samples absorbance, it was observed that lemon peel and pulp absorbed more thiabendazole. Further work was carried out by HPLC technique for determination of thiabendazole. The procedure was based on the solvent extraction by adding acetonitrile in the sample. To remove the moisture of the sample, sodium chloridewas used. Results obtained from HPLC chromatograms showed that lemon had high concentration of thiabendazole as compared to others sample. Cucumber had lowest concentration of thiabendazole. It was observed that thiabendazole concentration was low in market available fruits and vegetables.Both these techniques showed accurate and more precise results that were needed for the analysis of pesticide residue in fruits and vegetables.