Rapid and Simultaneous Analysis of Multiple Classes of Antimicrobial Drugs by Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry and Its Application to Routine Biomedical, Food, and Soil Analyses

Antimicrobial agents (AMAs) are widely exploited nowadays to meet the high demand for animal-derived food. It has a significant impact on the food chain whose end consumers are human beings. The burden of AMAs on humans comes from either meat or crops cultivated on soil containing high residual antibiotics, which are responsible for the global crisis of antibiotic resistance. Thus, the objective of this study was to design a selective and sensitive liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS)/MS-based simultaneous bioanalytical method for estimation of twenty AMAs in human plasma, raw meat, and soil samples. The selective extraction of all analytes from the above matrices was performed by the solid-phase extraction clean-up method to overcome the interferences. Analytes were separated on a Waters Symmetry Shield C18 (150 × 4.6 mm 2 , 5 μm) column, using an isocratic solvent system of methanol-0.5% formic acid (80:20, v/v) with 0.75 mL/min flow rate. The average extraction recoveries for all analytes in plasma were ranged from 42.0 to 94.0% with relative standard deviations (RSDs) below ±15%. All of the validation parameters are in accordance with the United State Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) guidelines. Moreover, the method was also valid for a broad plasma concentration range and can be proposed as an excellent method for routine pharmacokinetic studies, therapeutic drug monitoring, clinical analysis, and detection and quantitation of AMA remnants in raw meat as a standard quality control test for human consumption.