Progesterone is the representative progestogens in five major classes of steroid hormones and plays important roles in mammalian pregnancy and animal growth and development. Conventional available analytical methods for progesterone involve immunoassay, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), and high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS), which lack specificity or usually require sophisticated operations and relatively long time. Herein, we developed a novel strategy for rapid analysis of progesterone via direct analysis in real time mass spectrometry (DART-MS) combined with solid-phase extraction (SPE) using an amino functionalized metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Under optimized conditions, a wide linear range of 0.5-500 ng mL-1 was achieved, with a satisfactory correlation coefficient (R2 = 0.9992). The relative standard deviations (RSDs) were in the range from 2.4 to 8.4%, demonstrating good precision. The applicability was then confirmed by analyzing spiked lake water and synthetic urine samples, and recoveries are between 92.0 and 117.8% in all three spiked levels (5, 25, and 100 ng mL-1). The sensitivity was notably improved compared with solely DART-MS and obtained detection limit decreased by about 50 times. This research provided a rapid, simple, highly sensitive, and efficient approach for analysis of hormones through combination of advantages of ambient mass spectrometry and porous nanomaterials. Graphical abstract.
Keywords: Direct analysis in real time mass spectrometry; Metal-organic frameworks; Progesterone; Sample preparation; Solid-phase extraction; Steroid hormones.