Determination of 14 aniline derivatives in water by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry

Abstract

A new and fast method was developed for the simultaneous determination of 14 aniline derivatives ( ADs) in water by direct injection-liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) through optimizing chromatographic and mass spectrometric conditions. The water sample was filtered through a 0.45 µm polyether sulfone (PES) microfiltration membrane. The separation was performed on a Shim-pack FC-ODS column (75 mm x 4.6 mm, 3 µm) with methanol-0.1% (v/v) formic acid aqueous solution (35:65, v/v) as mobile phases in gradient elution mode. The flow rate was 0.3 mL/min, and the column temperature was 35 °C. The analytes were detected by LC-MS/MS in multiple reaction monitoring mode. Under the optimized conditions, the analysis of the 14 aniline derivatives was completed within 12 min and the calibration curves showed good linearity with correlation coefficients not less than 0.999. The detection limits of the 14 aniline derivatives ranged from 0.03 µg/L to 4. 19 µg/L. The relative standard deviations of the 14 aniline derivatives in the spiked surface water at three levels (0. 5, 5.0, 20.0 µg/L) were 0.4%-9.4% (n = 6). The proposed method has the advantages of good anti-interference ability, rapidness and high sensitivity. It was successfully applied to the analysis of real samples, and the recoveries of the 14 aniline derivatives in the spiked real samples were 68.0%-130%.