Quantitative Analysis of the Aminosteroidal Muscle Relaxant Vecuronium in Rat Liver and Kidneys Using Ion-Pairing and Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry

Abstract

Muscle relaxants are occasionally encountered in forensic toxicological cases for identification and quantitation. Due to unavailability of human samples, the analysis of the muscle relaxant vecuronium was done using post-mortem rat visceral samples. Rats were injected with bolus overdose of the drug and the post mortem samples were subject to ion-pair extraction with metanil yellow dye. Method for identification of the drug by LC-MS-MS was established first with secondary standard aqueous vecuronium solutions and then applied on the questioned samples. Quantitation was done to find the quantity of the drug in liver and kidney samples.