SCREENING OF HONEY FOR RESIDUES OF ANTIBIOTICS BY AN OPTICAL BIOSENSOR

Residues of antibiotics and chemotherapeutics are frequently detected in honeys of various origin. In order to handle large numbers of samples, automated screening by biosensors can be applied. An efficient analytical procedure for the determination of some prominent antibiotics (chloramphenicol, streptomycin, sulfonamides, tetracyclines) is the combination of a biosensor based screening with a subsequent confirmatory analysis by chromatographic/mass spectrometric methods. This article focusses on chloramphenicol. Screening is carried out on a surface plasmon resonance biosensor (Biacore Q®) in an immunochemical inhibition assay while confirmatory analysis is performed after derivatisation by a highly sensitive gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) or GC-MS/MS method in negative chemical ionisation (NCI) mode. The specified detection limits for both methods are set to 0.1 µg/kg although lower limits can be achieved. Results from routine samples obtained by both methods in parallel are compared to characterise the quality of the screening method. A good correlation of the results is observed.