Establishment and application of a screening method for 354 organic toxicants in blood and urine with high-performance liquid chromatography-high-resolution orbitrap mass spectrometry

A rapid and sensitive high-performance liquid chromatography-high-resolution orbitrap mass spectrometry method was developed for the simultaneous screening of 354 organic poisons and metabolites in blood and urine, including drugs, medications, pesticides, rodenticides, veterinary drugs, alkaloids, and mycotoxins with a multi-toxicant chromatography-mass spectrometry information library. The method and library showed good prospects in clinical poisoning screening and forensic toxicological identification. Blood and urine samples were extracted successively with ethyl acetate in acidic and alkaline conditions; then, the extract was blown to nearly dry by nitrogen gas and redissolved with methanol-aqueous solution (v:v, 50:50), and the dissolved solution was analyzed by LC-MS/MS after filtering. Precursor ions' m/z was set for identification, retention time, fragment ions, and isotopic pattern which were used for confirmation. No interference peaks were found in the blank samples, showing good specificity. The LODs of toxicants in urine and blood were 1.00x10(-3) -50.0 ng/mL and 2.07x10(-3) -50.0 ng/mL, respectively, while the LOQs were 3.30x10(-3) -1.67x10(2) ng/mL and 6.91x10(-3) -1.67x10(2) ng/mL. The intra-day precision and inter-day precision of urine samples were 2.31-9.13% and 4.75-12.3%, respectively, which were 1.92-10.8% and 2.01-12.1% in blood samples. The established method was applied to analyze 9 cases of clinical poisoning patients, and bromadiolone, carbofuran, and amanitins were detected, respectively. A total of 382 biospecimens from drug abusers were analyzed with the proposed method, which indicated that some drugs were detected in 62 cases, mainly including methamphetamine, heroin, and MDMA. The results were consistent with the information from traditional liquid chromatography-triple quadrupole mass spectrometry.

Automated summary

A rapid and sensitive high-performance liquid chromatography-high-resolution orbitrap mass spectrometry method was developed for the simultaneous screening of 354 organic poisons and metabolites in blood and urine. The method showed good prospects in clinical poisoning screening and forensic toxicological identification.