Improved Sensitivity to Determine Antibiotic Residues in Chicken Meat by In-Line Solid-Phase Extraction Coupled to...

Traditionally, capillary electrophoresis (CE) has been ruled out of many food safety applications, despite its inherent advantages, because its concentration sensitivity has been not high enough, mainly in relation to the monitoring of contaminants and residues, such as pesticides, veterinary medicines, environmental contaminants, toxins, etc. For this reason, researchers have proposed several strategies to overcome this limitation. So far, approaches based on chromatographic principles have been the most successful solutions. These approaches, known as in-line solid phase extraction, consist of the introduction of a small amount of stationary phase in the inlet section of the electrophoretic capillary (analyte concentrator, AC) to retain the analytes before separation takes place. In this chapter, this strategy is applied to CE coupled to tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) for the multiresidue detection of quinolone antibiotic residues in chicken meat. A previous sample treatment based on pressurized liquid extraction to obtain an optimum performance is also described.