Terbuthylazine-(ethyl-d₅)

Terbuthylazine-(ethyl-d₅)is an isotope-labeled analog of triazide herbicide terbuthylazine, widely used for vegetation management in forest plantations.

Isotope-labeled compounds are increasingly used in isotope dilution mass spectrometry (IDMS) for the quantitative analysis of pesticides. The main advantage of using the IDMS technique is because isotope-labeled compounds have nearly the same physical properties as their non-labeled counterpart analog, and thus show identical behavior during the workup and sample preparation process. This helps in overcoming the problems of matrix effects generally encountered in the usual LC-MS/GC-MS analysis potentially resulting in biased results. By spiking the sample before workup with its isotope labeled analog, the loss of analyte that leads to matrix effects can be determined and compensated.