Simultaneous determination of 12 lipophilic shellfish toxins in plasma and urine by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry

Lipophilic shellfish toxins pose significant threats to the health of seafood consumers and public health. The symptoms of these kinds of toxins include severe diarrhea, abdominal cramps, nausea and gastrointestinal disorders. These symptoms could be hardly distinguished with many other symptoms of food poisoning and diseases. Therefore, a fast and accurate determination method in human biological samples is urgently needed for the accurate judgement of food poisoning incident, which is important for the investigation of public health emergencies and clinical treatment of poisoned patients. However, there were several flaws of the previous studies reported on the analysis of lipophilic shellfish toxins: (1) limited target compounds were covered; (2) the pre-treatment process was complex; (3) the sensitivity of the compound was low. In this study, a simple extraction method coupled with ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS) was developed for the simultaneous determination of 12 lipophilic shellfish toxins, including azaspir acid 1 (AZA1), azaspir acid 2 (AZA2), azaspir acid 3 (AZA3), dinophysistoxin 1 (DTX1), dinophysistoxin 2 (DTX2), gymnodimine (GYM), hyessotoxin (HYTX), okadaic acid (OA), pinnatoxin (Pntx), pectenotoxins 2 (PTX2), spirolides 1 (SPX1), yessotoxin (YTX), in plasma and urine. Firstly, the instrument conditions were optimized. Different additions in mobile phase were compared and 0.05% (v/v) ammonia solution was selected since it can improve the peak shape of YTX and HYTX, and increase the respondence by four times. Secondly, the volume of acetonitrile (0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 1.0 mL) use for the extraction of the target compounds in plasma was optimized. Satisfactory recoveries were obtained when 0.6 mL of acetonitrile was used. At the same time, satisfactory recoveries were obtained when 0.9 mL of acetonitrile was used in urine samples. Finally, under the optimized conditions, the 12 compounds in plasma and urine samples were ultrasonically extracted with acetonitrile. Chromatographic separation was performed on a Phenomenex Kinetex C18 column (50 mm×3 mm, 2.6 μm) with 90% (v/v) acetonitrile aqueous solution and water containing 0.05% (v/v) ammonia as mobile phases. Gradient elution with a flow rate of 0.40 mL/min was employed. The 12 compounds were monitored in the multiple reactions monitoring (MRM) mode with electrospray ionization (ESI) under both positive and negative conditions. The matrix effects of the 12 compounds ranged from 0.8 to 1.1. Therefore, external standard calibration curves were used for the quantification. The 12 shellfish toxins showed good linear relationship in the range of 0.03-36.25 μg/L with the correlation coefficients greater than 0.995. The limits of detection (LODs, S/N=3) were 0.08-0.21 ng/mL for the urine samples and 0.10-0.28 μg/L for the plasma samples, respectively. The limit of quantitations (LOQs, S/N=10) were 0.23-0.63 μg/L for the urine samples and 0.31-0.84 μg/L for the plasma samples, respectively. The recoveries of the 12 compounds were in the range of 72.7%-124.1% at three spiked levels (i. e., LOQ, three times LOQ, and ten times LOQ). The intra-day and inter-day precisions were 2.1%-20.0% and 2.1%-15.3%, respectively. The method was applied in the detection of the 12 lipophilic shellfish toxins in the urine and plasma samples of healthy humans and mice previously injected with the 12 shellfish toxins intraperitoneally. None of the 12 toxins were found in the samples from healthy human, while all of the 12 lipophilic shellfish toxins were found in the urine and plasma samples collected from the poisoned mice in the range of 1.14-2.35 μg/L and 1.01-1.17 μg/L, respectively. The established method has the advantages of sensitive, quick, easy to operate, and of low sample volume. It can be used for the simultaneous determination of 12 lipophilic shellfish toxins in urine and plasma samples.