Suspect screening of veterinary drug residues in hotpot ingredients based on ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-quadrupole/electrostatic field Orbitrap high-resolution mass spectrometry

Prolonged exposure to veterinary drug residues in animal-derived foods jeopardizes human health, necessitating rapid, reliable methods to detect such residues even in complex food matrices. Here we describe and validate a method to detect diverse residues in commercially available animal-derived ingredients for hotpot. The method involves ultra-performance liquid chromatography followed by high-resolution mass spectrometry based on the electrostatic field Orbitrap. Data acquisition was performed in full MS/data-dependent MS² (full MS-ddMS²) mode. A systematic suspect screening protocol was developed by incorporating a bespoke veterinary drug mass spectral library alongside a suspicious screening list. Method validation exhibited acceptable linearity for 91 veterinary drugs, with correlation coefficients (R²) surpassing 0.99 for all analytes, limits of quantification ranging from 1.0 to 25.0 μg/kg, recoveries from 61.0% to 116.8%, and relative standard deviations between 1.0% and 13.7%. In real samples of tripe, aorta and squid, the method detected residues of anesthetics, sulfonamides, quinolones, glucocorticoids, and macrolides. The results suggest that our method may be a useful, sensitive high-throughput method to screen for diverse veterinary drug residues in animal-derived hotpot ingredients.