Abstract.A cyclodextrin-modified micellar electrokinetic chromatography separation for 18 different pesticides (metsuifuron-methyl, rimsulfuron, thifensulfuron-methyl, desethylatrazine, desisopropylatrazine, atrazine, simazine, terbuthylazine, 2,4-D, MCPR MCPB, dicamba, linuron, alachlor, metolachlor, orbencarb, propiconazole, prochloraz) from eight different substance classes with very varying chemical and physical properties is presented. In particular acidbase characteristics and water-octanol distribution coefficients diverge in wide ranges. 3-cyclodextrin was successfully employed as a modifier in separating the hydrophobic analytes. Peak distortion of some neutral analytes, which is devoted to the methanol content of the sample zone, was reduced by increasing the SDS concentration. Methanol in the sample is necessary for a better solubility of the hydrophobic pesticides. Few optima of SDS concentration exist allowing the separation of sulfonylureas as well as phenoxy acids and hydrophobic pesticides. An improved resolution of the sulfonylureas was achieved with tetramethylammonium chloride, which was used as an ion-pairing reagent.' Final operating conditions for the separation of all these plant protectant compounds by MEKC in just one single run are a 27mmolL -1 phosphate buffer, pH 8.03, with 95mmolL-1SDS, 5rmnolL =1 /3-cyclodextrin and 10 mmolL -1 tetramethylammonium-chloride.Key words: capillary electrophoresis, micellar electrokinetic chromatography, multi-residue-analysis, pesticide analysis. * To whom correspondence should be addressedThe relevance of high performance capillary electrophoresis (HPCE) applied in multi-residue methods for trace analysis of plant protectants in environmental samples has attained growing interest in the past few years. With a few exceptions authors restrict themselves to one class of pesticides, such as triazines [1-3], hydroxy-or methoxymetabolites of triazines, either alone or in combination with their parent compounds [4][5][6][7], phenoxy acids [8-11 ], phenylurea-[12], sutfonylurea-[13, 14J or dipyridylium-pesticides [15,16]. The application of capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) dominates over micellar electrokinetic chromatography (MEKC). For neutral analytes or more complex pesticide mixtures MEKC is selected [17][18][19][20][21][22]. HPCE is more versatile than HPLC and GC since there is nearly no restriction to certain pesticide classes and therefore derivatization becomes unnecessary. Within the HPCE-techniques MEKC is more likely to separate complex substance mixtures than CZE, which is restricted to charged substances. This is due to various surfactants and modifiers that can be selected and combined in MEKC to optimize separation.In the field of multi-residue separation several successful attempts are published which show the general viability of MEKC technique. These approaches, however, were confined to mixtures of hydrophilic and moderately hydrophobic pesticides [18,21] including one hydrophobic pesticide at maximum [22]. If more than one hydrophobic ...