Fast and highly efficient liquid chromatographic methods for qualification and quantification of antibiotic residues from environmental waste

Abstract

Antibiotics are life-saving drugs, projecting their pivotal role in preventing and mitigating infectious diseases from the time of their evolution. The mass production of antibiotics was started in the twentieth century, primarily of semisynthetic derivatives of naturally occurring antimicrobial molecules and a few purely synthetic compounds. As a result, the whole bacterial populations were subjected to unprecedented antibiotic evolutionary pressures, leading to the accelerated development of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) among many infectious microorganisms that we encounter today. Consistent disposal and perseverance of antibiotics in ecosystems have been recognized as evolving environmental health hazards. Conventional techniques for removing antibiotics, such as wastewater treatment plants, have been proved to be inefficient. In addition, antibiotics should be proactively removed from environmental matrices. For setting the standard guideline by authorities for antibiotics disposal in the environment and their confinements, it is essential to develop highly efficient analytical methods for the qualification and quantification of antibiotic residues in the environmental matrices. Generally, antibiotics in the environmental matrices are complex and below the nanogram or picogram range; hence, sample purification and enrichment are quite essential prior to analysis. This review presents an overview of sampling techniques for antibiotics from environmental matrices, their purification and enrichment by liquid–liquid extraction, solid phase extraction, lyophilization and rotary evaporation. The review highlighted various qualification and quantification of extracted antibiotics that have been carried out by using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), ultra-high performance liquid chromatography (UPLC) and liquid chromatography tandem mass spectroscopy (LC-MS/MS). © 2022 Elsevier B.V.