Determination of 82 veterinary drugs in swine waste lagoon sludge by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry

- Extraction and purification of multi-classes of compounds in sludge samples.
- Separation and detection of 82 compounds by UHPLC-MS/MS in 9.5 min..
- Sulfonamides, quinolones, and tetracyclines were detected in real samples.

This work reports the development of a multi-residue method for the identification and quantification of 82 veterinary drugs belonging to different chemical classes in swine waste lagoon. The proposed method applies a solid-phase extraction procedure with Oasis PRiME HLB cartridges that combines isolation of the compounds and sample clean-up in a single step. Analysis is performed by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, in one single injection with a chromatographic run time of only 9.5 min. Linearity was studied in the range between 1 and 500 μg kg−1 using standards prepared both in pure solvent and in the presence of matrix, showing coefficients of determination higher than 0.99 for all the analytes except for cefapirin in matrix. The average recoveries were in the range of 60-110% for most of the compounds tested with inter-day relative standard deviations below 17%. More than 97% of the investigated compounds had less or equal to a 5 μg kg−1 quantitation limit in the studied matrix. Finally, the method was used with success to detect and quantify veterinary drugs residues in real samples with sulfonamides, quinolones, and tetracyclines being the most frequently determined compound groups.