Resumen
Triazine derivatives are well-known commercially available compounds used for selective weed control in different crops, such as corn and sugarcane. Some of them are considered persistent organic compounds in the environment and it is important to improve the features of herbicide formulae, to estimate their physicochemical properties and to determine their retention behavior in modern analytical techniques that can be used in the determination of pesticides in environmental samples. The present study deals with a comprehensive analysis of the chromatographic behavior of a series of 6-chloro-1,3,5-triazines with alkyl and cycloalkyl substituents, among which some compounds possess herbicidal and fungicidal activity. The anisotropic lipophilicity of triazine derivatives was determined using reversed-phase ultra high performance liquid chromatography with octadecyl and phenyl columns and applying binary (methanol/water and acetonitrile/water) and ternary (methanol/acetonitrile/water) mobile phases under isocratic conditions. The retention data were analyzed using chemometric pattern recognition methods (hierarchical cluster analysis and principal component analysis) and sum of ranking differences method. The obtained results are excellent indicators of the retention behavior and the lipophilicity of the analyzed series of triazines and can serve as an outstanding basis for the development of new chromatographic methods for the determination of triazines in environmental samples.