Abstract
BACKGROUND: Antibiotics are widely used in veterinary medicine; consequently, drug residues may remain in animal-based foods and cause adverse health effects in consumers. Thus, this study aimed to establish a screening method for residual investigation in different types of meat. AIM: This study aimed to develop and validate a high-performance liquid chromatography-ultraviolet method for the simultaneous determination of ciprofloxacin (CI), enrofloxacin (EN), doxycycline (DOX), and chloramphenicol (CAM) in poultry, red meat, and fish products and to investigate their residues in different meat samples. METHODS: The targeted analytes with ondansetron as an internal standard were extracted from various meat matrices using acetonitrile in a single process step. Separation was achieved using an ACE(®️) C(18) column (10 cm, 4.6 mm i.d., 5 µm) with a mobile phase of 0.2% formic acid: acetonitrile (22:78, v/v) at a flow rate of 0.7 ml/minute. Detection was performed at a fixed wavelength of 280 nm with a runtime of 10 minutes. The developed method was validated for selectivity, linearity, sensitivity, accuracy, precision, and recovery following the European guideline EMA 2012. To evaluate the presence of the targeted antibiotic residues, 13 poultry, 25 red meat, and 3 fish samples were randomly collected from the local market. RESULTS: The validation results for each analyte met the acceptable criteria. The targeted analytes exhibited a linear curve over the dynamic range of 10-1,000 ng/g for CI and EN, 80-8,000 ng/g for DOX, and 50-500 ng/g for CAM. Most of the randomly collected poultry and red meat samples contained CI residues. A few samples contained EN and DOX residues, whereas no CAM was detected in any of the collected samples. CONCLUSION: The developed method was successfully validated and applied to investigate antibiotic residues in various meat types.