Simultaneous Determination of Caffeine, Taurine and Five Water-Soluble Vitamins in Tobacco Products by HPLC–MS/MS

Abstract

The simultaneous determination of caffeine, taurine and five water-soluble vitamins (B1, B2, B3, B9, and B12) in tobacco products by high-performance liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC–MS/MS) was established in this work. Tobacco powders of sampled tobacco products were extracted with water and then filtered. The filtrates were separated on an Agilent Eclipse XDB-C18 (2.1 mm i.d × 150 mm, 3.5 μm) column using methanol: ammonium acetate aqueous solution (10 mM) as the mobile phase at a flow rate of 0.3 mL min−1 using the gradient elution mode. These analytes were detected by electrospray ionization–tandem mass spectrometry (ESI–MS/MS) using a multiple reaction monitoring method. Under the optimized conditions, the separation of caffeine, taurine and five water soluble vitamins was achieved within 12 min. The linear ranges of caffeine, taurine and vitamins B1, B2, B3, B9, and B12 were 2.000–100.0, 0.3316–3316, 0.1248–249.6, 1.600–160.0, 0.5990–29.95, 0.3150–31.50, and 0.2246–2246 μg L−1, respectively, with linear correlation coefficient greater than 0.997. The detection limits (S/N = 3) of caffeine, taurine and vitamins B1, B2, B3, B9, and B12 were 0.445, 0.079, 0.031, 0.400, 0.179, 0.079, and 0.066 μg L−1, respectively. The precisions for intra-day (n = 11) and inter-day (n = 5) were 0.09–2.23% and 0.11–2.52%, respectively. The recoveries of these seven analytes in the spiked tobacco product samples were in the range of 95.1–102.8%. The proposed method has the merits of easy operation, fast analysis, high sensitivity and accuracy, which is applicable for batch determination and surveillance on caffeine, taurine and water-soluble vitamins in commercial tobacco products.