ABSTRACT
Sulphonylureas form a class of herbicides introduced in the 1980s. From a chemical point of view sulphonylureas are labile and weakly acidic compounds. Compared to older herbicides, sulphonylurea herbicides have much lower use rates and are more rapidly degraded in soil. When present, very low concentrations (low parts per trillion region) of these herbicides in environmental waters are then to be expected. For this reason and because of the chemical characteristics cited above, monitoring of these herbicides in water is a particularly challenging problem. Although various separation techniques, such as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry of sulphonylurea derivatives [1], supercritical fluid chromatography [2] and capillary electrophoresis [3,4] have been proposed to analyse sulphonylurea in various matrices, liquid chromatography is the technique of choice [5-10]. Liquid chromatographic methods have become even more attractive since the introduction of robust and sensitive devices, such as thermospray and electrospray, to interface liquid chromatography to mass spectrometry.
