Development of a highly sensitive time-resolved fluoroimmunoassay for the determination of trace salbutamol in environmental samples.

Veterinary drug residues have become a major source of environmental pollutants. To monitor trace salbutamol (SAL) in the environment, a highly sensitive and reliable time-resolved fluoroimmunoassay (TRFIA) was developed. Under the optimum parameters, the half-maximal inhibition concentration (IC50) and the limit of detection (LOD, IC10) were determined to be 0.08 μg/L and 0.66 ng/L with a linear range (IC20 - IC80) of 0.0028-2.25 μg/L for SAL. The IC50 and LOD of the TRFIA improved approximately 5-fold and 31-fold, respectively, when compared with our previously reported ELISA data. When compared to most other conventional methods, the TRFIA also showed an excellent sensitivity and accuracy for the detection of SAL. Recoveries from 83.4 to 111.3% and standard deviations (RSDs) from 3.9 to 14.0% were observed in various environmental SAL-spiked samples, including river water, paddy water, livestock wastewater, vegetable field soil and rice paddy soil. In addition, the developed TRFIA showed largely consistent with analytic results from UPLC-MS/MS (R2 = 0.9825, n = 15). These results suggest that the proposed TRFIA can be applied as a sensitive and reliable monitoring method to detect trace SAL in environmental samples.