Date of Award

Spring 5-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department/Program

Forensic Science

Language

English

First Advisor or Mentor

Marta Concheiro-Guisan

Second Reader

Ana Pego

Third Advisor

Eduardo de Campos

Abstract

Oral fluid has been gaining importance in forensic and clinical toxicology for many different drug testing scenarios. Oral fluid is composed of saliva, along with gingival fluid, bacteria, and food residues. Drug testing using oral fluid has many advantages over other matrices (blood, urine) such as the non-invasive collection, reduced risk of tampering, and shorter detection windows which show recent drug use. The purpose of this study was to develop an analytical method for the determination of 19 drugs of abuse and metabolites in oral fluid by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) and compare three different extraction methods: liquid-liquid extraction (LLE), solid phase extraction (SPE) and supported liquid extraction (SLE), to determine which procedure yielded the best recovery of the target analytes. The developed methods used 1 mL of oral fluid-NeoSal buffer mixture (0.25 mL oral fluid and 0.75 mL buffer). The linearity range was either 0.5-1 ng/mL to either 20, 100, or 200 ng/mL, depending on the analyte. Most analytes had process efficiencies and extraction efficiencies greater than 50% for LLE and SPE. All compounds had bias within ±20% and precision

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