Chemometrics-enhanced full scan mode of liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry for the simultaneous determination of six co-eluted sulfonylurea-type oral antidiabetic agents in complex samples

•A rapid and green chemometric-enhanced full scan mode of LC–MS method was developed.•ATLD was employed to solve the overlapped peaks and uncalibrated interferences.•ATLD-LC–MS was applied to determine six SOADs in health teas and human plasma samples.•The proposed method proved to be fast, low-cost, high sensitivity and simple implementation.•This methodology conformed to the highly recommended green analytical chemistry principles.

In this work, a rapid chemometrics-enhanced liquid chromatography–single stage mass spectrometry (LC–MS) was developed for the simultaneous green determination of six co-eluted sulfonylurea-type oral antidiabetic agents (SOADs) in health teas and human plasma samples. Shortening the chromatographic separation time and reducing the cost per analysis were achieved via using full scan mode of LC–MS under simple isocratic elution condition followed by an environment-friendly “mathematical separation” strategy. The problem of the complete separation of target analytes from each other and/or from the uncalibrated interferences in complex matrices was resolved by alternating trilinear decomposition (ATLD) method as a posteriori. Satisfactory qualitative and quantitative results were obtained even in the existence of unknown interferences and the “second-order advantage” was fully exploited. The average spiked recoveries for all target analytes were between 81.6% and 110.1% with standard deviations less than 7.7%. It was demonstrated that the proposed strategy could be promisingly used for green resolution and determination of co-eluted multi-analytes of interest in complex samples while avoiding elaborate sample pretreatment steps and complicated experimental conditions as well as more sophisticated high-cost instrumentations.