AS220: Initial Development Work for the Automated Derivatisation of Glyphosate and Aminomethylphosphonic Acid in Water Followed by LC-QQQ Analysis

Martin Perkins

13th March 2019

Glyphosate is a herbicide commonly used to kill off weeds competing with desirable crops. Once applied, glyphosate breaks down into aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA). This degradation product can be used to indicate the use of glyphosate.

Glyphosate has been heavily reported on recently, with many countries restricting future use due to potential carcinogenic effects.

Current methods involve derivatisation followed by solid phase extraction (SPE) as a sample clean up and enrichment step before injection.

The manual procedure can be time consuming due to the many steps involved and therefore potentially prone to error.

This application note describes an automated method employing the derivatisation of glyphosate and AMPA using 9 -fluorenylmethylchloroformate (FMOC-Cl) prior to injection.

Unlike previous work, this method does not have an SPE step for sample clean up reducing preparation time and consumables usage even further. Good linearity was obtained with R2 > 0.995 and very good % RSD and recovery were observed across the whole range.

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