Antemortem and postmortem rodenticide analysis in forensic toxicology as a part of an LC-MS/MS-based multi-target screening strategy

Since rodenticides represent a substance group relevant in toxicological analyses, the aim of this work was the development of a complex multi-target screening strategy for the identification with liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. A simple protein precipitation was used as the sample preparation strategy. Further, a Luna 5 μm C18 (2) 100 Å, 150 × 2 mm analytical column was applied for the separation of relevant analytes with a Shimadzu HPLC. Signal detection was performed with a SCIEX API 5500 QTrap MS/MS system. The rodenticides investigated (α-chloralose, brodifacoum, bromadiolone, coumatetralyl, difenacoum, and warfarin) could be incorporated effectively into a multi-target screening strategy covering about 250 substances representing different groups with a limit of detection appropriate for substance identification. The strategy can easily be modified to perform semi-quantitative measurements for this substance group and could be supplemented by quantification based on standard addition.