Author(s)

Caroline C. Wang, Petra Hartmann-Fischbach, Tim R. Krueger, Alisha Lester, Aaron Simonson, Terry L. Wells, Max O. Wolk, Nick J. Hidlay

Industrial Laboratories, Wheat Ridge, USA.

A simple, rapid, sensitive and reproducible method for enantiomer analysis of methamphetamine, amphetamine, cathinone and methcathinone was developed and validated. The compounds were extracted from equine plasma and urine using a fast liquid-liquid extraction procedure. Only one milliliter plasma and one hundred microliter urine sample is needed for analysis. The extraction procedure had good recovery (>70%) and the matrix effect was negligible. Enantiomer differentiation and confirmation were achieved using liquid chromatography with chiral stationary phase and mass spectrometry detection. The method demonstrated excellent reproducibility with intra-day and inter-day precision of lower than 5%. The lower limits of detection for all of the compounds studied here were at low pg/mL level for both plasma and urine. This is the first report of the analysis of four chiral compounds in equine plasma and urine. Routine application was demonstrated for (S)- and (R)-enantiomer differentiation.

Amphetamines and Cathinones, Equine Plasma and Urine, Chiral Analysis, Liquid Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometry

Wang, C. , Hartmann-Fischbach, P. , Krueger, T. , Lester, A. , Simonson, A. , Wells, T. , Wolk, M. and Hidlay, N. (2015) Fast and Sensitive Chiral Analysis of Amphetamines and Cathinones in Equine Urine and Plasma Using Liquid Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometry. American Journal of Analytical Chemistry, 6, 995-1003. doi: 10.4236/ajac.2015.613094.