Identification of new minor metabolites of penicillin G in human serum by multiple-stage tandem mass spectrometry.

Liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) and liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS) were applied to characterize drug metabolites. Although these two methods have overcome the identification and structural characterization of metabolites analysis, they remain time-consuming processes. In this study, a novel multiple-stage tandem mass spectrometric method (MSn) was evaluated for identification and characterization of new minor metabolism profiling of penicillin G, one of the β-lactam antibiotics, in human serum. Seven minor metabolites including five phase I metabolites and two phase II metabolites of penicillin G were identified by using data-dependent LC/MSn screening in one chromatographic run. The accuracy masses of seven identified metabolites of penicillin G were also confirmed by mass spectral calibration software (MassWorks™). The proposed data-dependent LC/MSn method is a powerful tool to provide large amounts of the necessary structural information to characterize minor metabolite in metabolism profiling. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.