A confirmative method was developed with high performance liquid chromatography coupled with electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS) to simultaneously detect 16 quinolone residues in animal tissues, which included nalidixinic acid, oxolinic acid, flumequine, norfloxacin, enoxacin, ciprofloxacin, lomefloxacin, danofloxacin, enrofloxacin, ofloxacin, sarafloxacin, difloxacin, marbofloxacin, pefloxacin, sparfloxacin and orbifloxacin. In the method, the 16 residues were extracted with acidified acetonitrile, cleaned-up with hexane, and concentrated with a rotary evaporator. Then the reconstituted sample solution was analyzed using HPLC-MS/MS in positive mode, with a Inertsil C8-3 column as the analytical column. The method was validated at 10, 50 and 100 μg/kg. The validation results were as follows: the linear ranges were from 10 to 100 μg/kg; the overall recoveries were from 62.4% to 102% with the relative standard deviations of 1.4%-11.9%. The method is simple, rapid, and accurate, and its performance could meet the requirements of the domestic and international legislation. The method is applicable to simultaneously confirm multi-residues of quinolones in animal tissues such as chicken muscle, chicken liver and fish muscle.
