Determination of pyridine, 2-picoline, 4-picoline and quinoline from mainstream cigarette smoke by solid-phase extraction liquid chromatography/electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry

The present paper describes the development and validation of a new reversed-phase liquid chromatography–electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometric method (RP-HPLC–ESI-MS/MS) for simultaneous determination of pyridine, 2-picoline, 4-picoline and quinoline from mainstream cigarette smoke. Liquid–liquid extraction followed by solid-phase extraction was applied to extract the target analytes from cigarette smoke. Baseline chromatographic separation was achieved by utilizing a Zorbax SB-Aq (4.6 × 150 mm, 5 μm) column in gradient chromatographic conditions with acetonitrile and ammonium acetate buffer as mobile phases. Popular commercially available Indian brand filtered and non-filtered cigarettes were analyzed using the same method. The identification of each chemical was established by chromatographic retention times, analyte specific fragmentation patterns and relative peak area ratios of two product/precursor ion pairs. The limit of detection of this method ranged from 1.74 to 14.32 ng/cig using an injection volume of 20 μl. The reproducibility of this method is excellent and better standard deviations were obtained compared to literature reported values for these chemicals. RSD value is less than 9% for all analytes.