Abstract:

A method was established for the simultaneous determination of 9 water soluble vitamins in drinks using
high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry interfaced with electrospray (HPLC-MS-MS). The
pretreatment procedure using solid phase extraction with Supelco C18 (500 mg) was simple. An Agilent plus C18 (2.1 mm ×
100 mm, 3.5 μm) column was used for the chromatographic separation, and gradient elution was performed with 0.1%
formic acid and acetonitrile as the mobile phase. Mass spectral acquisition was done in the positive ion mode by applying
multiple reaction monitoring. The method was validated in terms of linearity, sensitivity, repeatability, recovery and
selectivity. Satisfactory results in the majority of the cases were obtained, with practical limits of detection acceptable for
routine monitoring purposes. Average recoveries for the analytes ranged from 80.11% to 115.56% at spiking levels of 0.05,
0.1 and 1 mg/L. The intra- and inter-day precision (RSD) were both less than 10%.

Key words: water soluble vitamin, high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS-MS), drinks