Safety methods for chlorpyrifos removal from date fruits and its relation with sugars, phenolics and antioxidant capacity of fruits.

The effectiveness of different postharvest wash treatments at two levels (10 and 20 g/l) for different dipping times was determined to remove chlorpyrifos from date fruits treated at concentration of 2 mg/l. The recovered amount of chlorpyrifos was extracted based on the solid phase extraction (SPE) method and then analyzed by gas chromatography with mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The results demonstrate that the removal of chlorpyrifos increased in the order of acetic acid (AA)> citric acid (CA)> hydrogen peroxide (H2O2)> potassium permanganate (KMnO4)> running water (H2O), and the percent of pesticide residue on date fruits depended on the concentration of tested washing treatments and dipping time without the formation of the toxic by-product, chlorpyrifos-oxon. Kinetic studies revealed that chlorpyrifos was found to be more easily removable from date fruits treated with the tested chemical solutions with t1/2 values of 12-29 min compared with roughly 53 min in case of running water. The impact of these washing treatments on quality of date fruits illustrated that all treatments exerted a little negative effect on total sugars content but H2O2 and KMnO4 at level of 2 % had more drastic effect. Whereas, running water, 10 and 20 g/l CA caused significant increases in total phenolic contents, during all the tested contact times compared with control. Except the insignificant effect of KMnO4 treatments, antioxidant capacity of date fruits tended to increase in all wash treatments, when the contact times were 5 or 15 min.