Simultaneous determination of nitrite and nitrate in potato and water samples using negative electrospray ionization ion mobility spectrometry.

Nowadays, nitrite and nitrate ions are analyzed in biological samples using laborious and expensive methods; such as HPLC, CE, MS-MS. In this work, the simultaneous analysis of nitrite and nitrate ions was conducted by electrospray ionization-ion mobility spectrometry (ESI-IMS), without using any complicated or laborious derivitization step. Ion mobility spectrometry with low cost, inexpensive maintenance and very fast analysis makes an attractive technique for the simultaneous determination of these ions in foodstuff and drinking water samples. The analyte interference was systematically investigated for binary mixture analysis. The obtained results provided detection limits of 3.8 and 4.7 µg/L for nitrite and nitrate, respectively. A linear dynamic range of about 2 orders of magnitude, and relative standard deviations below 5% were obtained by the proposed method for the analysis of both ions. Also, the proposed method was used to analyze various real samples of potato and drinking water samples, and the obtained results confirmed the capability of negative ESI-IMS for the simultaneous detection of nitrite and nitrate.