Rapid screening of toxic salbutamol, ractopamine, and clenbuterol in pork sample by high-performance liquid chromatography-UV method

A rapid and simple high-performance liquid chromatography-UV method was developed for the separation and quantification of salbutamol, ractopamine, and clenbuterol in pork. A mixture of acetonitrile formic acid ammonium acetate was used as the mobile phase to separate three beta-agonists on a C18 column with gradient. The effects of the addition of formic acid and ammonium acetate to mobile phases on the separation of beta-agonists were investigated. These additives can greatly improve the resolution and sensitivity. Under the optimized chromatographic condition, this separation does not need extra sample preparation. Complete baseline separation of three beta-agonists was achieved in < 20 minutes; the linear range is 0.2-50 mu g/L with a correlation coefficient R-2 value of > 0.99. Excellent method reproducibility was found by intra- and interday precisions with a relative standard deviation of < 3%. The detection limit (S/N = 3) was found to be <0.05 mu g/L; this method can be used for routine screening of the beta-agonist residues in foods of animal origin before being identified by confirmatory methods. Copyright (C) 2016, Food and Drug Administration, Taiwan. Published by Elsevier Taiwan LLC. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.