Simultaneous determination of diaveridine, trimethoprim and ormetoprim in feed using high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry

• A LC-MS/MS method was developed to detect three sulfonamide potentiators in animal feed.
• A dichloromethane extraction method was established.
• The method was validated to have high recovery, sensitivity, and robustness.
• The method was successfully applied to detect three sulfonamide potentiators in feed.

This study developed and validated a simple and reliable method for detecting and quantifying DVD, TMP and OMP in feed using dichloromethane extraction followed by HPLC-MS/MS. A matrix effect evaluation was performed using the post-extraction spiking method, and levels were less than ±15% in all three feeds with their corresponding concentrations. LOD and LOQ, CCα and CCβ were 20 μg kg−1 and 40 μg kg−1, 8.68–15.55 μg kg−1 and 10.61–18.92 μg kg−1 for all analytes, respectively. Calibration curves were linear for DVD, TMP and OMP with R2 ⩾ 0.990 and r ⩾ 0.995, respectively. Recoveries of low, medium and high concentrations using the proposed method ranged from 74.4 to 105.2%. Repeatability and within-laboratory reproducibility were <7.4% (RSD). The chosen seven factors had no a significant influence on robustness. The method showed good performance when it was applied to analyze other laboratory-prepared or actual feed samples.