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Quinolones are a group of synthetic antibiotics that are widely used in veterinary medicine. Their residues may remain in tissues, milk, etc. intended for human consumption. The European Union fixes the maximum residue limits (MRLs) of veterinary medicinal products in foodstuffs of animal origin. Analytical methods are therefore needed to determine them in biological samples. In this study, we describe capillary isotachophoresis-capillary zone electrophoresis (ITP-CZE) to analyze three quinolones, enrofloxacin (ENR), ciprofloxacin (CPR) and flumequine (FLU), in pig plasma samples. We used solid-phase extraction with Oasis HLB cartridges as a sample pretreatment clean-up step. Capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) requires low amounts of sample and is not as sensitive as one would wish. ITP-CZE is an easy way to increase the sample loadability and sensitivity. With this system sensitivity increases 40-fold. The detection limits for CPR, ENR and FLU were 70, 85 and 50 mug l(-1), respectively, which were lower than their MRLs in different kinds of samples. This method is simple and sensitive, and is therefore an alternative tool to the existing HPLC methods for analyzing the residuals of these quinolones in biological samples. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.