Multi-plug Filtration Purification Combined with High-Performance Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry for the Simultaneous Determination of Pesticides, Veterinary Drugs, Mycotoxins, and Persistent Organic Pollutants in Livestock and Poultry Meat

A method for the determination of 106 pesticides, 74 veterinary drugs, 10 mycotoxins, and 18 persistent organic pollutants in livestock and poultry meat was developed and validated in the present study. The meat was extracted with acetonitrile under citric acid caching and purified using the multi-plug filtration clean-up (m-PFC) column. The components were separated using liquid chromatography on a C₁₈ column and then eluted using a gradient of the aqueous solutions of acetonitrile and 0.1% formic acid (containing 2 mmol/L ammonium acetate) as the mobile phase. The mass spectrometry analysis was performed next using two electrospraying scan modes—the positive ion mode and the negative ion mode, and multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) modes. The results revealed that all 208 target analytes exhibited good linearity in their respective linear ranges, with the correlation coefficient of each analyte above 0.9953 and the corresponding limits of quantification (LOQs) in the range of 0.1–9.8 µg/kg. The average recovery values of 189 targets at three different spiked levels of low, medium, and high ranged from 70.1 to 120.0%, and the corresponding values of relative standard deviation (RSD) ranged from 1.3 to 15.0%, respectively. The remaining 19 targets exhibited the average recovery values [at three different spiked levels of low, medium, and high] ranging from 18.6 to 58.9%, with the corresponding RSD values ranging from 1.5 to 11.3%. The developed method was applied to 132 batches of livestock and poultry meat, and nine pesticides and seven veterinary drugs were detected in the concentration range of 0.1–24.8 µg/kg. These results suggested that the developed method is simple, reliable, reproducible, and suitable for the determination of pesticides, veterinary drugs, mycotoxins, and persistent organic pollutants in livestock and poultry meat.