Determination of azide in gastric fluid and urine by flow-injection electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry.

A rapid method was developed to identify and quantify the azide ion (N(3)(-)) in gastric fluid and urine. N(3)(-) in diluted biological fluids was reacted with NaAuCl(4) to produce Au(N(3))(2)(-), which was extracted with octanol. Five microliters of the extract were flow-injected into an electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometric instrument. Quantification of N(3)(-) was performed by selected reaction monitoring of the product ion Au(N)(N(3))(-) at m/z 253, which was derived from the precursor ion Au(N(3))(2)(-) at m/z 281, using 50 μL of aqueous solution within 10 min. This method was found to be linear up to 10(-5) M, to have a limit of quantification of 10(-7) M, a limit of detection of 3.0 × 10(-8) M, and a coefficient of variation of ≦10% at 10(-7) M. In the case of urine, 50 μL of urine were spiked with N(3)(-), this was diluted 10-fold and passed through 1 mL of a resin, and finally diluted to 100-fold of the original. This method was linear up to 10(-3) M, had a limit of quantification of 10(-5) M, a limit of detection of 3.0 × 10(-6) M, and coefficient of variation of ≦8.8% for an original urine concentration of 10(-5) M. The practical applicability of this method was checked by diluting 1 μL of a suspected suicide victim's gastric fluid 20,000-fold and 1 μL of the victim's urine 5,000-fold and then measuring the N(3)(-) levels. These levels were found to be (7.5 ± 1.0) × 10(-2) M and (3.2 ± 0.4) × 10(-3) M, respectively.