Determination of Eight Antifungal Drug Residues in Meat by QuEChERS Extraction Coupled with UPLC-MS/MS

An analytical method was developed for the rapid determination of the residues of eight antifungal drugs (fluconazole, ketoconazole, naftifen, bifonazole, clotrimazole, econazole, griseofulvin, and miconazole) in pork, beef and mutton by quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged and safe (QuEChERS) extraction coupled with ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS). In this study, several important experimental parameters were effectively optimized using spiked samples, including the type of extraction solvent, extraction time, adsorbent type, adsorbent dosage and salt dosage. Under the optimum extraction and detection conditions, the detection process was completed within 7 minutes in the positive ion multiple reaction monitoring mode and quantification was performed by an external standard method. Good linearity was observed over the concentration range of 0.05‒10.00 ng/mL (r > 0.998), the limit of detection (LOD) was 0.1 μg/kg, and the limit of quantitation (LOQ) was 0.3 μg/kg. When this method was used to detect meat samples spiked with the analytes, good repeatability and stability was obtained, with accuracy within 15%, average recoveries of 85.7%‒113.6% for the intra-day assay (n = 6) and 87.6%‒107.9% for the inter-day assay (n = 3) and coefficient of variation (CV) of 1.2%‒14.8%. The QuEChERS-UPLC-MS/MS method is simple, rapid, efficient and accurate, and can be used for the rapid qualitative and quantitative analysis of the eight antifungal drug residues in meat.