Fragmentation pathway of hypophosphite (H2PO2−) in mass spectrometry and its determination in flour and flour products by LC-MS/MS

The fragmentation pathway of H2PO2- in MS was obtained by Orbitrap HRMS and the reverse confirmation was carried out by the neutral loss detection experiment. The results showed that H2PO2- with even electron ion would produce the neutral loss of 2H and form a new even electron ion with a pair of lone-pair electrons. Based on this, a LC-MS/MS method was developed for the determination of H2PO2- in flour and flour products. The H2PO2- was separated on an Acclaim Trinity P1 composite ion exchange column, and then detected by MS/MS under MRM mode. Finally, the developed method was validated in terms of the linearity, selectivity, accuracy, precision and matrix effect. The method showed a good linearity (R2＞0.999) in the concentration range of 50 ∼ 1500 μg/L. The LOD and LOQ for H2PO2- were 10.0 mg/kg and 30.0 mg/kg, respectively. The average recoveries and RSDs (n = 6) were 93.0%∼102.9% and 2.6 ∼ 5.6%, respectively.