High-Throughput Screening and Quantitation of Target Compounds in Biofluids by Coated Blade Spray-Mass Spectrometry

TASCON, MARCOS; GÓMEZ-RÍOS, GERMAN AUGUSTO; REYES-GARCÉS, NATHALY; POOLE, JUSTEN J.; BOYACI, EZEL; PAWLISZYN, JANUSZ

ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY

AMER CHEMICAL SOC

Año: 2017

0003-2700

Most contemporary methods of screening and quantitating controlled substances and therapeutic drugs in biofluids typically require laborious, time-consuming, and expensive analytical workflows. In recent years, our group has worked towards developing microextraction (μe)-mass spectrometry (MS) technologies that merge all of the tedious steps of the classical methods into a simple, efficient, and low-cost methodology. Unquestionably, the automation of these technologies allows for faster sample throughput, greater reproducibility, and radically reduced analysis times. Coated Blade Spray (CBS) is a μe technology engineered for extracting/enriching analytes of interest in complex matrices, and it can be directly coupled with MS instruments to achieve efficient screening and quantitative analysis. In this study, we introduced CBS as a technology that can be arranged to perform either rapid diagnostics (single vial) or the high-throughput (96-well plate) analysis of biofluids. Furthermore, we demonstrate that performing 96-CBS extractions at the same time allows the total analysis time to be reduced to less than 55 seconds per sample.Aiming to validate the versatility of CBS, substances comprising a broad range of molecular weights, moieties, protein binding, and polarities were selected. Thus, the high-throughput (HT)-CBS technology was used for the concomitant quantitation of eighteen compounds (mixture of anabolics, β-2 agonists, diuretics, stimulants, narcotics and β-blockers) spiked in human urine and plasma samples. Excellent precision (~2.5%), accuracy (≥ 90%), and linearity (R2 ≥0.99) were attained for all the studied compounds, and the limits of quantitation (LOQ) were within the range of 0.1 to 10 ng·mL-1 for plasma and 0.25 to 10 ng·mL-1 for urine. The results reported in this paper confirm CBS?s great potential for achieving sub-sixty-second analyses of target compounds in a broad range of fields such as those related to clinical diagnosis, food, the environment, and forensics.