Credit: J. Murray/NIST
NIST researcher Jacolin Murray records the mass of an oat flour sample.
Pesticides help farmers increase food production, reduce costly damage to crops, and even prevent the spread of insect-borne diseases, but since the chemicals can also end up in human food, it’s essential to ensure that they are safe. For a commonly used pesticide known as glyphosate, concerns exist over how high a level is safe in food as well as the safety of one of its byproducts, known as AMPA. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are advancing efforts to measure glyphosate and AMPA accurately in the oat-based food products where they frequently appear by developing reference materials.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) establishes tolerances for pesticide levels in food that are still considered safe for consumption. Food manufacturers test their products to make sure they meet EPA regulations. But in order to make sure their measurements are accurate they need a reference material (RM) with known levels of glyphosate with which to compare their products.
There is no reference material available for measuring glyphosate, the active ingredient in the commercial product Roundup, in the oatmeal or oat-based products in which the pesticide is heavily used. However, there are a small number of food-based RMs available for measuring other pesticides. In efforts to develop one for glyphosate and meet the immediate needs of the manufacturers, NIST researchers have optimized a test method to analyze glyphosate in 13 commercially available oat-based food samples to identify candidate reference materials. They detected glyphosate in all the samples, and they also found AMPA (short for aminomethylphosphonic acid) in three of the samples.
The researchers ha ..
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