Analysis of 122 Veterinary Drugs in Meat Using All Ions MS/MS with an Agilent 1290/6545 UHPLC-Q-TOF System Authors

The presence of veterinary drugs (VDs) in meat may pose a health risk to humans during consumption; therefore, monitoring of VD residues for regulatory enforcement and risk assessment is commonly conducted. Several hundred VDs are available spanning a number of classes with very different chemical characteristics. This typically requires sophisticated analytical methods and instruments, generally based on LC-MS/MS, sophisticated workflows, and often tedious data processing. In this study, a 12-minute analytical method was developed for 122 priority VDs in meat. The method uses Agilent All Ions MS/MS on an Agilent Q-TOF LC/MS instrument along with the Agilent Veterinary Drugs personal compound database and library (PCDL) to test the method. All 122 VDs were spiked into bovine liver, kidney, and muscle tissue at levels of 0.5, 1, and 2 times the maximum tolerance levels for each drug. These spikes were then analyzed using All Ions data acquisition mode in an Agilent 6545 Q-TOF LC/MS. The Agilent MassHunter Find by Formula software was used to detect and verify the presence of these compounds. The PCDL provides MS/MS spectral and retention time information about each compound enabling a data review process to quickly and reliably filter out false positives. At all three spike levels, > 92% of VDs were detected in every matrix. To demonstrate the ability of this system to deliver quantitative results, calibration curves were generated for ground beef and liver starting at low ng/g levels. With >85% VDs having an R2> 0.99 without correction using any internal standard, this method can be used to do screening and quantification of VDs in animal matrices in one analytical run.