Sensitive and Fast Measurement of Aminoglycoside Antibiotics in Milk, Meat or Eggs by HILIC-MS/MS and Identification using MRM Spectrum Mode

Aminoglycoside are an antibiotic family widely used for the treatment of bacterial infections in cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry. Due to their high affinity for tissues, the consumption of meat, milk or eggs containing aminoglycosides (AGs) can be potentially hazardous for human health. Regulatory agencies have set maximum residue limits (MRL) for these compounds with veterinary use. Depending on the countries, the animal species, the commodity or the AG, these MRL are different. For food safety laboratories testing large numbers of samples, a method capable to cover as many compounds, matrices and regulated range as possible would be of great help. In addition, some AGs are strictly banned for some commodities (e.g. spectinomycin in eggs) or have low MRL. So in the case of a positive sample, a strict identification of the compound is necessary to confidently report potential fraud. AGs are very polar compounds poorly retained by reversed-phase liquid chromatography and ion-pairing reagents are not desirable when users share several methods on a single system. Here we present a method using hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILiC) with high sensitivity mass spectrometer to reach limits of quantifcation at femtogram level on column, combined with MRM Spectrum Mode for formal identification.