Fast determination of 22 sulfonamides from chicken breast muscle using core–shell nanoring amino-functionalized superparamagnetic molecularly imprinted polymer followed by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry

• An effective d-μ-SPE procedure with CS-NR-Mag-MIP adsorbent has been developed for extraction of 22 SAs.
• The proposed sample preparation procedure is environmental friendly, less time and solvent-consuming.
• A novel d-μ-SPE UFLC-MS/MS method for analysis of 22 SAs in chicken breast muscle has been developed.
• LOQs are significantly lower than other reported LC-MS/MS-based methodologies.

A novel, simple and sensitive method was developed for the simultaneous determination of 22 sulfonamides (SAs) in chicken breast muscle by using the dispersive micro-solid-phase extraction (d-μ-SPE) procedure combined with ultra-fast liquid chromatography-tandem quadrupole mass spectrometry (UFLC-MS/MS). The excellent core–shell nanoring amino-functionalized superparamagnetic molecularly imprinted polymer (CS-NR-Mag-MIP) was used as sorbent, and the main factors affecting the extraction efficiency were investigated in detail. All target compounds showed good linearities in the tested range with correlation coefficients (r) higher than 0.9980. The mean recoveries were in the range of 85.0–112.2% at low, medium and high concentration levels (0.1, 1.0 and 5.0 ng/g). The intra-day and inter-day relative standard deviations (RSDs) were lower than 6.0% and 8.9%, respectively. The limits of quantification for the 22 SAs were between 0.013 and 0.099 ng/g. The developed d-μ-SPE-UFLC-MS/MS method had been successfully applied to the chicken breast muscle samples for food-safety risk monitoring in Zhejiang Province, China. The results showed sulfamethazine, sulfamethoxazole and sulfaquinoxaline in five out of three hundred collected samples were detected with concentrations of 0.418–2.28, 16.4 and 2.93 ng/g, respectively. It was confirmed that the CS-NR-Mag-MIP was a kind of highly effective d-μ-SPE materials used for the SAs analyses.