A method using liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry was developed for simultaneous determination of 40 kinds antibiotics of sulfonamides, fluoroquinolones and tetracyclines residues in chicken muscle. The sample was extracted with acetonitrile-water (80:20,v/v), defatted with n-hexane saturated with acetonitrile and cleaned up on a Waters Oasis HLB cartridge. The analytes were separated on Acquity UPLC® BEH C18 column using gradient elution mode with a mobile phase containing 0.1% formic acid in water/acetonitrile at a flow rate of 0.3 ml/min.The purified extracts were analyzed by LC-MS/MS under the mode of positive electrospray ionization and multiple reaction monitoring. The results indicated that the calibration curves were good linear from 2 to100 ng/mL with the correlation coefficient more than 0.99. The overall recovery varies from 50.1% to 123.7% at the spiked levels of 50-200 µg/kg with RSD less than 20%. The detection limits ranged from 0.3 to 5 µg/kg. The quantitation limits ranged from 0.1 to 10 µg/kg. The method was suitable for the identification and quantification of 40 kinds antibiotics of sulfonamides, fluoroquinolones and tetracyclines in chicken muscle.

The authors acknowledge the support of the Innovation Scientists & Technicians Troop Construction Projects of Zhengzhou City (10LJRC192).