Sensitive determination of nine anticoagulant rodenticides in blood by high resolution mass spectrometry with supported liquid extraction pretreatment

Abstract

Anticoagulant rodenticides (ARs) have been widely used for controlling rodents in agriculture and households. It often occurs that non-target animals are poisoned by ARs. Also, the abuse of ARs has been often encountered in poisoning and suicide cases. Herein we report the determination of nine commonly used ARs by high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) with supported liquid extraction (SLE) pretreatment. The factors affecting SLE (elution solvents and pH values) were systematically tested and optimized. The application of parallel reaction monitoring (PRM) mode led to the highest sensitivity obtained for these compounds, with LODs ranging for 0.006–0.02ng/mL. Reasonable extraction recoveries for all the analytes were obtained ranging in 73.9%–110.7%. Good precision was achieved for the spiked blood samples, with intra-day RSD ranging in 5.0%–9.2% and inter-day RSD ranging in 6.3%–10.5%. The values of ME ranged in 82.9%–103.2% for QC sample, which are reasonable. The application of HRMS in PRM mode also resulted in high selectivity. The method was applied to the detection and quantification of ARs in blood samples from real forensic cases. This methodology possesses high potential for determination of rodenticides in clinical and forensic cases.