There is a common worldwide concern about the quality of life and one of the most important requirements is to ingest safe and nutritious food. The administration of antibiotics in cattle to treat several infectious diseases has contributed to the contamination of industrialized milk. The goal of this work was to develop a simple and fast method to identify and quantify fourteen antibiotics from different classes in milk, including five b-lactams, four sulfonamides, three tetracyclines, one macrolide and one cephalosporin, using reversed-phase liquid chromatography with electrospray ionization and triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (MS/MS). This technique used Multiple Reaction Monitoring (MRM) acquisition mode to allow the determination of the proposed compounds in the concentration range from 0.75 to 375 µg L-1, within coefficient of linearity (r) higher than 0.9960, selectivity, sensitivity, and speed, with analysis time less than 10 minutes. Dicloxacillin and erythromycin showed the lower and higher decision limits (ccalpha) results of 0.05 and 9.77 µg L-1, respectively. Overall, the recoveries results ranged from 65 to 125%, with standard deviation values from 2.0 to 15%. This method was also applied to evaluate the quality of different fat milk brands offered in the Brazilian market.
milk; antibiotic residues; mass spectrometry
