Targeted analysis of six emerging derivatives or metabolites together with 25 common macrolides in milk using Quick, Easy, Cheap, Effective, Rugged and Safe extraction and ultra-performance liquid chromatography quadrupole/electrostaticfield orbitrap mass spectrometry.

An analytical method for the determination of six emerging derivatives or metabolites together with 25 common macrolides antibiotics in milk by ultra-performance liquid chromatography quadrupole/electrostaticfield orbitrap mass spectrometry was established. The samples were purified with optimized Quick, Easy, Cheap, Effective, Rugged, Safe methods. The amounts of primary-secondary amine, C18, and sodium acetate adsorbent materials were optimized by response surface method to obtain the best purification effect. The chromatographic separation was carried out using the XBridge-C18 (2.1 × 100 mm, 3.5 µm, Waters) column with mobile phase of acetonitrile with 0.1% v/v formic acid-water solutions (containing 10 mmol/L ammonium acetate), separated by gradient elution. The instrument was operated in the detection mode of electrospray positive and negative ions with Full MS/data dependent MS2 acquisition mode detection, external standard method was used for quantitative analysis. The limits of detection and limits of quantitation of 31 compounds were 0.1-0.5 µg/L and 0.5-2.0 µg/L, respectively. A total of 31 compounds performed a good linearity in the range of 1 to 200 µg/L, and the correlation coefficient was greater than 0.990. The spiked recoveries in milk samples were 81.07-110.1% and the relative standard deviation was less than 5.1%. The method was successful applied to actual sample testing in the market.