Quantification of multi-class antibiotics by UHPLC–MS/MS analysis combined with salt-assisted acetonitrile extraction: comparative evaluation of dairy and poultry manure

ABSTRACT

A comprehensive multiresidue method for the analysis of 33 antibiotics from 7 prevalent classes was comparably investigated for both dairy and poultry manure samples, which can be important pollution sources for the release of antibiotics into the environment. Following salting-out-assisted extraction with acetonitrile, the antibiotics were quantified with ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry without a clean-up step. By changing the composition of the mobile phase for chromatography, a pronounced signal enhancement was achieved not only for tetracyclines (TCs) but also for other groups of antibiotics in the manure samples. Although the physicochemical properties of selected antibiotics were quite different, the apparent recovery values from dairy and poultry manure samples by using an extraction solvent comprising McIlvaine buffer and ethylenediaminetetraacetic solution at pH 3 were 86–121% and 89–113%, respectively. Apparent recovery of the antibiotics was not remarkably affected by the extraction solvent over a wide range of pH values, with the exception of the recovery of TC antibiotics from poultry manure, which was in the 53–55% range at pH 8. Furthermore, the poor performance of the analytical method for a few of the antibiotics in poultry manure was correlated with high metal and organic contents of the complicated matrix. The high suppression effects of co-eluted matrix components were compensated by constructing matrix-matched calibration curves and by using internal standards. Simultaneous quantification of seven different antibiotic classes with low limit of detection values varying from 0.38 to 31 μg kg^?1 for dairy manure and from 0.32 to 5.85 μg kg^?1 for poultry manure facilitated their monitoring. The application of the developed analytical method to dairy, broiler and layer-hen manure samples from confined animal feeding operations showed that a wide variety of antibiotics at high concentrations were found in broiler manure.