Chitosan from shrimp shells: A renewable sorbent applied to the clean-up step of the QuEChERS method in order to determine multi-residues of veterinary drugs in different types of milk

Clean extracts are essential in LC-MS/MS, since the matrix effect can interfere in the analysis. Alternative materials which can be used as sorbents, such as chitosan in the clean-up step, are cheap and green options. In this study, chitosan from shrimp shell waste was evaluated as a sorbent in the QuEChERS method in order to determine multi-residues of veterinary drugs in different types of milk, i.e., fatty matrices. After optimization, the method showed correlation coefficients above 0.99, LOQs ranged between 1 and 50 mu g kg(-1) and recoveries ranged between 62 and 125%, with RSD < 20% for all veterinary drugs in all types of milk under study. The clean-up step which employed chitosan proved to be effective, since it reduced both the matrix effect (from values between -40 and -10% to values from -10 to +10%) and the extract turbidity (up to 95%). When the proposed method was applied to different milk samples, residues of albendazole (49 mu g kg(-1)), sulfamethazine (< LOQ) and mebendazole (< LOQ) were found.