Tentative Structural Assignment of a Glucuronide Metabolite of Methyltestosterone in Tilapia Bile by Liquid Chromatography-Quadrupole-Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry.

Methyltestosterone (MT), a strong androgenic steroid, is not approved for use in fish aquaculture in the United States. It is used in the U.S. under an investigational new animal drug exemption (INAD) only during the early life stages of fish. There is a possibility that farmers feed fish with MT to enhance production for economic gains. Therefore, there is a need to develop methods for the detection of MT and its metabolite residues in fish tissue for monitoring purposes. Previously, our laboratory developed a liquid chromatography–quadrupole time-of-flight (LC-QTOF) method for characterization of 17-O-glucuronide metabolite (MT-glu) in bile of tilapia dosed with MT. The system used was an Agilent 6530 Q-TOF equipped with electrospray jet stream technology, operating in positive ion mode. Retrospective analysis of the data generated in that experiment by a feature-finding algorithm, combined with a search against an in-house library of possible MT-metabolites, resulted in the discovery of a major glucuro...