Analysis of chloramphenicol in honey by on-line pretreatment liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry

Chloramphenicol is an antibiotic and one of the potential contaminants in honey. Solid-phase extraction is the key pretreatment procedure for analysis of chloramphenicol in honey. In this work, an on-line pretreatment liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometer system for sensitive, reliable and higher throughput analysis was developed. With the methylcellulose-immobilized reversed-phase column, sugars in a honey sample were efficiently removed in 1 min. As a result, the limit of quantitation of chloramphenicol was 20 pg/mL (0.2 mg/kg honey).