Determination of thyreostatics in animal feeds by CE with electrochemical detector.

A simple, rapid, reproducible and sensitive method based on CE with electrochemical detector was developed for the simultaneous determination of five thyreostatics including 2-thiouracil (TU), 6-methyl-2-thiouracil (MTU), 6-propyl-2-thiouracil (PTU), 6-phenyl-2-thiouracil (PhTU) and methimazole (TAP) in animal feeds. A home-made wall-jet electrochemical detector with a 300 microm diameter platinum-disk-working electrode was equipped at the end of separation capillary and used to detect oxidation currents of these thyreostatics. Under the optimum experimental conditions, TU, MTU, PTU, PhTU and TAP could be well separated within 15 min at the separation voltage of 16 kV in 20 mmol/L sodium borate buffer (pH 9.2). The detection limits (S/N=3) of the five thyreostatics in animal feeds were found to be 7.6 microg/kg for TAP, 25 microg/kg for PTU, 15 microg/kg for PhTU, 18 microg/kg for TU and 20 microg/kg for MTU by the developed CE with electrochemical detector method coupled with solid-phase extraction sample pretreatment technique.