A High Performance Liquid Chromatographic Method for Quantitative Determination of Tetracyclines and its Epimers in Shrimp Muscle

A method for determination of tetracycline, oxytet- racycline, chlortetracycline, 4-epitetracycline, 4- epioxytetracycline and 4-epichlortetracycline in shrimp muscle tissue by high performance liquid chromatographic method (HPLC) with a UV detector is described. The method involves extrac- tion of the analytes by McIlvaine buffer, clean up by C18 SPE cartridge and analysis by HPLC and UV detection. A good separation of all the six analytes was achieved and good recovery (58 to 89%), repeatability and within laboratory reproducibility were possible with this method.