Pioneering research on emerging technology for risk-based pesticide monitoring

June 2024 | Canadian Food Inspection Agency | by Greg Appleyard, Jian Wang and Willis Chow

Pesticides play an important role in protecting our food supply, agricultural exports and imports from damage by insects, weeds and fungal diseases. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) monitors the levels of pesticide residues in food to ensure that any residues detected do not exceed levels considered safe for human health. The challenge for regulatory agencies like the CFIA is how to monitor as many of these compounds as possible while also maintaining efficiency and accuracy. Modern technology offers new strategies to achieve this balance.

The Calgary Laboratory

The CFIA’s Calgary Laboratory is a centre of expertise for analyzing pesticide residues. The lab has developed methods to detect hundreds of these residues in food products. Over the last several years, the Calgary lab’s research team has led the way in Canada with advanced and emerging technology to develop new methods for pesticide monitoring using an innovative approach called non-target data acquisition for target analysis (nDATA). The nDATA approach has the potential to support future CFIA monitoring programs and benefit laboratories with an improved workflow that could be less resource intensive – and with a larger, more flexible testing scope – than those currently in use.

The Calgary lab’s research team has expanded existing methods to increase the number of residues it can detect from a few dozen to hundreds of residues. However, current methods are close to capacity, and innovative workflows like nDATA may be necessary to support significant expansion of the program.

The chemical analysis of food

How are food samples analyzed for pesticides and other chemicals? There are three general categories of chemical laboratory methods used to analyze food for safety, security and authenticity:

  • targeted methods (TMs) can detect and quantify the presence of known compounds in a sample using reference standards
  • screening methods (SMs) are quick and simple methods used to detect known compounds above a specific set threshold
  • non-target methods (NTMs) use chemistry instrumentation to identify compounds in a sample without preselecting which chemicals to test for

Traditional TMs and SMs for pesticide residues require a full set (many hundreds) of expensive chemical standards as references for comparison with a sample. These methods are limited because they only detect the compounds they are designed to detect, and can only do so when these specific standards are available. Regulatory agencies like the CFIA can typically detect approximately 500 pesticides using traditional SMs and TMs.

When it comes to modern SMs and NTMs, the newest generation of chemistry instruments can quickly identify many chemical compounds in a sample and capture high-resolution data for each compound detected. This modern technology enables nDATA workflows to collect comprehensive and detailed chemical information from the samples without initially focusing on specific analytes. This allows a far wider range of compounds to be detected using in-house developed databases and complex computer algorithms. If certain compounds of interest are detected, they can then be flagged for targeted follow-up analysis.

The capabilities of this modern technology could potentially make it an ideal tool to:

  • screen samples for a large group of known (or expected) compounds using nDATA
  • detect unknown (or unexpected) compounds using NTMs

With this technology, a new approach to identifying food safety risks emerges, which could form the basis of risk-based and operationally leaner food safety programs. This application screens food samples for a very large number of known (or expected) or unknown (or unexpected) residues while maintaining the current testing scope. This could help create a risk profile of what we would expect to find in that food product, help the lab redesign its testing workflows for these residues, and inform the future direction of food safety monitoring programs.

With over a thousand pesticides on the market globally, regulatory agencies around the world may start to utilize more modern and flexible SMs and NTMs to complement resource intensive traditional SMs and TMs. This shift helps to maintain broad-coverage testing programs in a cost-effective way that supports food safety regulations.

Applications of nDATA

Over the past decade, there has been extensive research into high-resolution platforms and their applications to food safety and authenticity. The CFIA has emerged as a global leader in the field of nDATA applications research with partners in the USA, Europe and Asia. A few examples are discussed below.

Rapid screening

The Calgary Laboratory has successfully developed chemical contaminant databases and nDATA applications that allow the CFIA to quantify and rapidly screen for 850 pesticide residues in food in a single 14-minute run. This approach is supported by collaborations with international research partners and chemistry instrument manufacturers.

Development of collaborative workflows

A successful collaborative study with participation from 25 laboratories in Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia demonstrated the robustness of the nDATA workflow internationally. nDATA provides the CFIA, and the scientific community, with an opportunity to advance the field of chemical contaminant detection and to expand analytical scopes for analysis of pesticides and many other chemical contaminants in food.

Training and knowledge exchange

The Calgary lab’s research team organized seminars and provided training to colleagues across CFIA laboratories and other interested parties, including Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Health Canada, the Canadian Grain Commission, the National Research Council of Canada and Canadian universities, with the goal of advancing science and implementing this emerging technology.

Next steps

Current research is aimed at expanding nDATA applications and developing approaches for the identification of unknown (or unexpected) chemical contaminants, and for food authenticity investigations. Technology transfer and implementation of these new techniques are also underway.

Learn more

For questions about nDATA and other research at the Calgary Laboratory, please contact Jian.Wang@inspection.gc.ca.

Research publications

 
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