Liu Y, et al. Biomedical Chromatography, 2019, 33(10), e4634.
The plasma levels of nicotine and its primary metabolite, cotinine, show a strong correlation with their biological effects. A method utilizing UHPLC-MS/MS was developed and validated for the analysis of nicotine and cotinine in mouse plasma.
Chromatographic separation was performed using a BEH HILIC column, with acetonitrile (containing 0.1% formic acid) and 10 mM ammonium formate as the mobile phase. Gradient elution was conducted at a flow rate of 0.4 mL/min, with a total runtime of 3.6 minutes.
The quantitative ion transitions for nicotine, cotinine, and the internal standard nicotine-D4 (IS) were m/z 163.1 > 130.0, m/z 177.1 > 80.0, and m/z 167.1 > 134.0, respectively. The calibration ranges for both nicotine and cotinine extended from 5 to 500 ng/mL, with a lower limit of quantitation set at 5 ng/mL. The intra- and inter-day variability exhibited biases ranging from -4.61% to 12.00%, and imprecision was less than 11.12%.
Recovery, normalized to the IS, was between 90.62% and 98.95% for nicotine and from 89.18% to 101.53% for cotinine. The matrix factors, normalized to the IS, ranged from 106.00% to 116.44% for nicotine and from 100.34% to 109.85% for cotinine. Both nicotine and cotinine demonstrated stability under standard storage conditions.
This validated method has been successfully employed in a pharmacokinetic study in mice to determine the pharmacokinetic parameters for both compounds.