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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania » Eastern Regional Research Center » Microbial and Chemical Food Safety » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #390130

Research Project: Technology Development, Evaluation and Validation for the Detection and Characterization of Chemical Contaminants in Foods

Location: Microbial and Chemical Food Safety

Title: The QuEChERSER Mega-Method

Author
item Lehotay, Steven

Submitted to: LC GC North America
Publication Type: Trade Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 12/3/2021
Publication Date: 1/18/2021
Citation: Lehotay, S.J. 2021. The QuEChERSER Mega-Method. LC GC North America. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-021-03380-x.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-021-03380-x

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Introduced in 2003, the “quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged, and safe” (QuEChERS) sample preparation approach has become widely adopted in many applications, particularly in chemical residue analysis of foods. Prior to QuEChERS, sample preparation generally entailed several time-consuming, labor-intensive, and reagent-excessive steps, but the commercialization at the time of powerful, cost-effective, benchtop GC-MS and LC-MS/MS instruments enabled implementation of the elegantly streamlined QuEChERS procedure. Despite that analytical technologies have continued to improve in the past two decades, many laboratories are still using QuEChERS protocols developed for out-dated instrumentation. Recently, QuEChERS has been updated into QuEChERSER (more than QuEChERS is also “efficient and robust”) to better take advantage of the features provided by modern sample preparation and analytical techniques. Most notably, QuEChERSER is a “mega-method” that covers a broader scope of polar and nonpolar analytes in diverse sample types. In this article, the new QuEChERSER approach and its advantages over QuEChERS will be discussed.