Like its regulatory counterparts worldwide, the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) monitors food animal tissues for veterinary drug residues.  In support of this function, USDA Agriculture Research Service (ARS) conducts collaborative research to develop new analytical approaches that improve regulatory monitoring programs.  Sample preparation to efficiently recover a wide range of drugs from diverse matrices is the first challenge, and it is inherently difficult to fully recover and isolate veterinary drugs without extensive matrix co-extractives that induce signal suppression and sensitivity losses during mass spectrometric detection.  However, new cleanup materials on the market show promise to more selectively remove lipid components from extracts.  Experiments have shown high recoveries of &gt;150 veterinary drugs from bovine kidney using a streamlined method using EMR-Lipid for cleanup, which provides better performance than the current FSIS method using dispersive solid-phase extraction with C18.  Unfortunately, aminoglycoside antibiotics are not able to be extracted from animal tissues at the same conditions as other drugs, but they can be analyzed in the same 10 min ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography – tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS/MS) method by introducing an ion-pairing reagent into a combined final extract from each sample preparation method.  This saves time and reduces the number of expensive UHPLC-MS/MS instruments needed in the monitoring laboratory.  The final challenge in high-throughput monitoring of so many analytes to meet regulatory acceptable quantification and identification criteria involves reliable and accurate data processing and reporting without time-consuming human review of results.  Implementation of the summation peak integration function followed by automatic post-run processing to make yes/no analyte identifications based on fixed, pre-defined criteria has been shown to yield more consistent quantification and fewer false negatives and positives than currently common data processing approaches, but without the need for human review of peak integrations.

Adapting new techniques and instrumentation to improve the monitoring of > 150 veterinary drugs including aminoglycosides in food animal tissues

252nd National Meeting (2016)

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