Dear Colleagues,

The establishment of simple, sensitive, and efficient tools for the detection of ultratrace levels of contaminants in food matrices is necessary to ensure the safety of consumers. New varieties of pesticides continue to flood the market, requiring lower and lower detection limits for pesticides and therefore more sensitive, accurate, and efficient detection technology to achieve improved detection sensitivity and diversification of detection methods, shorten the response time, and improve the degree of automation of the instrument and the field detection capabilities.

To improve detection efficiency, detect potential threats in the form of pesticide residues in a targeted manner, and clarify the health risk, new, faster, easy to handle, environmentally friendly, and cheap methods are continuously needed thanks to the growing demands for legislative requirements in the area of food safety. Extraction methods should be generic to allow the detection of pesticides with different physicochemical properties. Thus, in addition to targeted pesticides, the scope of this analysis can expand if high-resolution mass spectrometry is used, performing targeted, nontargeted, and unknown analyses, including the detection of metabolites or unexpected pesticides.

The aim of this Special Issue is to provide insights into the progress and challenges in the development of analytical methods for pesticide residues in various food, plant, and nutraceutical samples. In addition to conventional targeted analysis and dissipation studies, suspect screening and unknown analysis are also welcome, applying high-resolution mass spectrometry or other suitable analytical techniques. Authors are kindly invited to contribute to this Special Issue, which I believe will have a significant impact in the field.

Dr. Svetlana Hrouzkova
Guest Editor

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• pesticide residues analysis
• gas or liquid chromatography with mass spectrometric detection
• high resolution mass spectrometry
• fast detection sensors
• green sample preparation techniques
• food analysis
• plant materials
• nutraceuticals
• ultratrace analysis
• risk assessment
• non-target screening