Deep eutectic solvents as switchable solvents for highly efficient liquid–liquid microextraction of phenolic antioxidant: Easily tracking the original TBHQ in edible oils

Abstract

Synthetic antioxidant tert-butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) is easily oxidized to tert-butylquinone (TQ) during the storage of edible oils, resulting in an obvious decrease in the content of TBHQ in edible oils. Therefore, it is quite desirable to develop a simple analytical method for accurately tracking the original content of TBHQ in edible oils. In this work, deep eutectic solvents (DESs) have been successfully used in room temperature vortex-assisted liquid–liquid microextraction (VALLME) of TBHQ from edible oils. The DES composed of ethylene glycol and choline chloride (ChCl) could selectively extract TBHQ from edible oils containing both TBHQ and TQ. The DES composed of sesamol and ChCl (molar ratio of 3:1) could efficiently reduce TQ to TBHQ and extract TBHQ from edible oils. The whole VALLME process only required 5 min at room temperature. This switchable DESs-based VALLME with common RP-HPLC analysis showed high efficiency and good performance with linearity (R2 = 0.9999) in 5–500 mg/kg range, detection limit of 0.02 mg/kg, recoveries of 96.1–106.0% and intra-/inter-day precision below 2.0%. This analytical method is suitable for detecting the current content of TBHQ and tracking the original content of TBHQ during the storage of edible oils at room temperature, respectively.