Determination of Sulfonamide Residues in Food by Capillary Zone Electrophoresis with On-Line Chemiluminescence Detection Based on an Ag(III) Complex

The presence of sulfonamide (SA) residues in foods is largely due to the raising of animals with sulfonamide antibiotics added or polluted feedstuff. In this paper, a sensitive method was developed for the determination of the residues of three sulfonamides in animal-derived food; the SAs include sulfadimidine (SDD), sulfadiazine (SDZ), and sulfathiazole (STZ). The method is based on capillary zone electrophoresis (CE) with online chemiluminescence (CL) detection, using an Ag(III) complex as an oxidant. These SAs have an inhibiting effect on the Ag(III)–luminol CL reaction. The electrophoretic buffer is 12.0 mM sodium borate. Under a set of optimized conditions, the linear ranges for the detections were found to be 10.0–200 µg·mL(−1) for SDD and SDZ, and 2.0–50.0 µg·mL(−1) for STZ. The detection limits were 2.75, 3.14, and 0.65 µg·mL(−1) for SDD, SDZ, and STZ, respectively. Relative standard deviations (RSD) for the peak heights were between 2.1% and 2.8% (n = 7). The proposed method was used in the analysis of the SAs in samples from pork meat, chicken meat, and milk, showing satisfactory detection results. A reaction mechanism was also proposed for the Ag(III)–luminol–SA CL reactions. The method has potential applications for the monitoring of residue levels of the three SAs in food, providing food safety data.