Nowadays, pesticides are essential production materials in modern agricultural production and play an important role in increasing food production and biological disaster prevention. At present, there are many varieties of pesticides in the world, which can be divided into insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, rodenticides, plant growth regulators, etc. However, the illegal use of a large number of pesticides has caused serious pollution to the environment, but also is endangering human health, the development of rapid detection of pesticide residues is increasingly important to all sectors of society. With the increasing concern for environmental protection issues, the concern for food safety is also gradually increasing. New varieties of pesticides continue to flood the market, requiring lower and lower detection limits for pesticides, and therefore require more sensitive, accurate and efficient detection technology to achieve improved detection sensitivity, diversification of detection methods, shorten the response time, improve the degree of automation of the instrument, and improve field detection capabilities.

Plant protection products are still widely used in fruits and vegetables growing to protect crops from pests. After their application, pesticides can remain in fruits and vegetables as residues and be incorporated into the food chain. Additionally, pesticides can be degraded into metabolites, which are included in the pesticide residue definition. Since these metabolites have different physico-chemical properties than the parent compound, developing methods that allow the simultaneous determination of both types of compounds is a complex task. Therefore, this Special Issue will analyze pesticide residues and/or metabolites in food matrices by applying advanced analytical methodologies. In addition to conventional targeted analysis and dissipation studies, suspect screening and unknown analysis are also welcome, applying high-resolution mass spectrometry or other suitable analytical techniques.