Fast determination of paraquat in plasma and urine samples by solid-phase microextraction and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry

A simple, sensitive and reliable gas chromatographic-mass spectrometric method (GC-MS) for quantifying paraquat concentration in biological samples has been developed, using ethyl paraquat as an internal standard. The method involved the procedures of sodium borohydride-nickel chloride (NaBH4-NiCl2) reduction and solid-phase microextraction (SPME) of the perhydrogenated products. GC-MS was used to identify and quantify the analytes in selected ion monitoring (SIM) mode. Under the optimal conditions, recoveries in plasma and urine samples were 94.00-99.85% and 95.00-100.34%, respectively. Excellent sample clean-up was observed and good linearities (r=0.9982 for plasma sample and 0.9987 for urine sample) were obtained in the range of 0.1-50 mu g/mL. The limits of detection (S/N = 3) were 0.01 mu g/mL in plasma and urine samples. The intra-day precision was less than 8.43%, 4.19% (n=3), and inter-day precision was less than 10.90%, 10.49% (n=5) for plasma and urine samples, respectively. This method was successfully applied to the analysis of the biological samples collected from a victim who died as a result of ingestion of paraquat. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.