Simple, Sensitive and Rapid Ultra-High Performance Liquid Chromatography- Atmospheric Pressure Chemical Ionization Tandem Mass Spectrometry for the Determination of Nicotine and its Nine Metabolites in Human Urine

摘要

A simple, sensitive and rapid UHPLC-MS/MS method was developed for the quantisation of nicotine and its nine metabolites in human urine. The assay only involves centrifugation and filtration of four times diluted urine, analysis was performed on an Agilent RRHD Eclipse XDB-C_(18) column (50 mm x 2.1 mm i.d., 1.8 μm, Agilent) using a gradient of 10 mM ammonium acetate, pH 6.8 and methanol as a mobile phase at a flow rate of 200 uL min'. Separated compounds were determined by atmospheric pressure chemical ionization (APCI) tandem mass spectrometry in the positive ion mode using MRM. The results showed ffiat: recoveries for nicotine and nine of its major metabolites ranged from 93.2-103.8 %; RSD for all the compounds were between 0.9 and 9.5 %. The described method was suitable for determining the nicotine dose in large-scale human bio-monitoring studies.