Simultaneous screening for 45 poisonous alkaloids in blood by LC-MS/MS

To develop a liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) screening method for 45 poisonous alkaloids in blood.

Identification was based on the compound's retention time and two precursor-to-production transitions. The method involved a liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) followed by LC-MS/MS with multiple-reaction monitoring (MRM). When 1 mL of blood was extracted with diethyl ether at pH = 9.2 with SKF525A as the internal standard, the target compounds were analyzed with LC-MS/MS in the positive ionization mode.

The target alkaloids had good linearity (r>0.995 1), both the intra-day precision and inter-day precision being less than 14.77%. The limits of detection ranged from 0.05 to 25 ng/mL in blood.

The method is selective and sensitive in detecting poisonous alkaloids with a total running time of 12 minutes; therefore it was successfully applied to some actual cases of suspected alkaloids poisoning.