• Journal of Korean Society on Water Environment
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.600-627
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• 2016

Korea is one of the countries with a large veterinary antibiotics market, although antimicrobial resistance in bacteria is becoming a serious issue in many countries. The Korean government started to take interest in estimating the effects of livestock manure on rivers and agricultural soils and in monitoring of heavy metals, organic pollutants and antibiotics in the ambient water and soil. In this paper, pre-treatment methods to separate the selected antibiotics from solid samples were reviewed. It is essential to select an efficient and appropriate procedure for pre-treatment due to the high proportion of proteins and organics in biosolid samples. Pre-treatment consists of extraction followed by clean-up. Initially, homogenized samples were extracted by sonication, mechanical agitation or pressurized liquid extraction with methanol/acetonitrile/water mixture under acidic/basic conditions depending on the compound. However, aminoglycosides and colistin were extracted with 5% trichloroacetic acid and HCl, respectively. Since the ${\beta}-lactams$ are easily decomposed in acidic and basic conditions, they were extracted in neutral pH. Filtration with a membrane (pore size, $0.2{\mu}m$) or solid phase extraction with HLB and methanol, as eluents, was normally applied for the clean-up. At least, three different pre-treatment procedures should be adopted to screen all the selected antibiotics in solid samples.