Extraction Method for Determining Florpyrauxifen-benzyl Herbicide in Soil

Florpyrauxifen-benzyl is the new active ingredient authorized by Brazilian legislation, which acts as herbicide and may be used to control weeds in rice cultivation, but studies on toxicity to humans and the environment are still under review. Due to recent insertion in the world pesticide market, there are still few studies related to the extraction and detection methodologies of this compound. Therefore, this study aimed to optimize and validate solid-liquid extraction with low temperature purification (SLE-LTP) for determining florpyrauxifen-benzyl in soil using high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to a diode array detection (HPLC-DAD). The results showed that the best conditions were achieved using Poroshell column, a temperature of 30 °C, mobile phase composition of acetonitrile:water (85:15 v/v) acidified with formic acid 0.1% (v/v), a flow rate of 0.3 mL min^-1, and 243 nm as the wavelength. The best extracting phase was acetonitrile acidified with formic acid 0.1% (v/v) which achieved a recovery rate ca. 100% and relative standard deviation (RSD) less than 3.9%. The methodology was precise, accurate, linear and selective, with a limit of quantification of 20 µg kg^-1. The stability study of this compound in soil showed that approximately 17.5 days is the half-life of florpyrauxifen-benzyl in soil.

Keywords:
florpyrauxifen-benzyl; SLE-LTP; arylpicolinate herbicide