Determination of seven free anabolic steroid residues in eggs by high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry.

A cheap, reliable and practical high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometric method was developed for the simultaneous determination of seven anabolic steroids in eggs, including trenbolone, boldenone, nandrolone, stanozolol, methandienone, testosterone and methyl testosterone. The analytes were extracted from the egg samples using methanol. The extracts were subjected to the removal of fat by freezing-lipid filtration and then further purified by liquid-liquid extraction using tert-butyl methyl ether. The analytes were separated on a Luna C18 column by a gradient elution program with 0.1% formic acid and acetonitrile. This method was validated over 1.00-100 ng/g for all steroids of interest. The correlation coefficients (r) for each calibration curve are higher than 0.99 within the experimental concentration range. The decision limits of the steroids in eggs ranged from 0.20 to 0.44 ng/g, and the detection capabilities were below 1.03 ng/g. The average recoveries were between 66.3 and 82.8% in eggs at three spiked levels of 1.00, 1.50 and 2.00 ng/g for each analyte. The between-day and within-day relative standard deviations were in the range of 2.4-11%. High matrix suppression effects were observed for all compounds of interest.