Determination of 9 fentanyl drugs in environmental water by UHPLC-MS/MS combined with solid phase extraction

Abstract

In this study, sensitive and selective SPE-UHPLC-MS/MS methods were established and applied to the determination of 9 fentanyl drugs in environmental water, in order to address the lack of research on wastewater-based epidemiology for fentanyl drugs. The methods involved purifying and enriching water samples using homemade PS/DVB-WCX SPE cartridges, followed by UHPLC-MS/MS analysis. In subsequent research, the performance of four SPE cartridges were compared, and the results revealed the superior performance of PS/DVB-WCX in terms of extraction efficiency and matrix removal. Optimized instrument parameters enabled qualitative and quantitative analysis of the 9 fentanyl drugs. For different matrices, two quantitative methods were developed and their correlation coefficient (r2) were all greater than 0.9945. The LODs and LOQs of all analytes were 0.17 ng/L and 0.50 ng/L respectively. Accuracy assessment via spiking standards into environmental water samples showed recoveries ranging from 81.4 % to 109.4 % and 81.6 % to 116.7 % respectively for two methods. The results suggested that the proposed methods were able to meet the needs of 9 fentanyl drugs monitoring in environmental water. Additionally, the greenness assessment of the proposed analytical method was evaluated by three greenness assessment metrics: National environmental methods Index (NEMI), Green analytical procedure Index (GAPI), and Analytical GREEnness metric (AGREE). The results indicate that the established method is environmentally friendly.