Determination of Kratom Using High Performance Liquid Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometry

Chromatography coupling to mass spectrometry becomes a vital instrumentation tool for the separation and determination of small molecules qualitatively and quantitatively. In this study, the author is focused on the mitragynine and 7hydroxymitragynine. Mitragynine and its major metabolite, 7-hydroxymitragynine (also known as “kratom”), are drugs which extracted from a tree planted in Thailand, Myanmar and other Southeast Asian countries. Nowadays, kratom compounds are used as recreational drugs in many countries all over the world. The previous report studied a novel method for screening and identification of mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine in human urine by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. However, the method conditions were not optimized. The objective of this study is to explore a rapid approach to separate and identify the kratom compounds by new instrumentationultra high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS/MS). Ultra high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS/MS) was utilized to perform method development and optimization. Experiments were carried out using a state-of-the-art ultra high performance liquid chromatography system. The method was found linear in the range of 10 100 ng/mL. In the linearity study, good regression equation and correlation coefficient were achieved. Comparing to HPLC system, UHPLC exhibited short analysis time and high selectivity. The optimized method can be used for the separation and detection of mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine.