Liquid chromatography, a valuable tool in the determination of antibiotics in biological, food and environmental samples

[Display omitted] •Antibiotics are highly used in human and animal medicine.•Their determination in biological fluids is required for clinical purposes.•Their determination in food products is needed to protect population.•LC is the gold standard method to conduct the corresponding analysis.•The main LC methods are described and discussed. This review is the result of a survey across the bibliography about the determination of several antibiotics in biological, food and environmental samples by liquid chromatography. Their determination in those samples is usually made in clinical monitoring, food safety and environmental studies. A brief description of the pharmacological activity is provided, to complement the relevance of the topic bioanalytical method. Exposure to antimicrobial agents, which can be evaluated by the analysis of biological fluids, comes mainly from their extensive use as veterinary agents in industrial animal farming, via food chain and residual water poured to the environment. Common columns and mobile phases are C18 ones and mixtures of aqueous buffers, acetonitrile and methanol, respectively. Retention times of these analyses are 20–30 min with column temperatures ranging from 15 to 45 °C and injection volumes of 10–20 µL. Detection is mainly performed by UV–Visible absorbance and MS/MS detection in positive mode, excluding glycopeptides where fluorescence was used. These procedures exhibit adequate analytical performances: good selectivity, precision, linearity range, ruggedness and sensitivity, though variable trueness. The future trend in the management and control of antibiotics in the here studied samples should be the development of automatized on-line detection protocols (sample processing coupled to chromatographic separation) for currently studied antibiotics and new methods for unknown metabolites and the transformation products.